Chapter Text
The mark on Lance’s wrist disappeared ten years ago. He hardly remembered what it looked like now, almost ten years later.
Everyone, no matter their species, was born with a mark on their wrist. It represented the other half of their soul, and took a form that would help them identify who it belonged to. As each person reached a certain age – usually around fifteen or sixteen – the mark would guide them in the direction of their mate. Many described it like a physical tug, one that pulled them to wherever they needed to be. Others said it was more like a burning sensation, or tingles, something that would lessen or intensify if they were getting close.
They were guiding forces, the marks. Like a map imprinted on a person’s soul.
Lance had been lost for a long time.
A mark would disappear if a person’s mate died. A soul gone meant a mark gone.
Usually, however, the bearer of the disappeared mark would die, too. Legends always said that people were born with only a fraction of a soul in them. The promise of that soul still being somewhere out in the world kept them alive. If a part of the soul died, then the other fractions would wither and fade away, too. In some ways, it was poetic. In other ways, tragic.
Lance’s family had thought he was going to die when his mark disappeared. He’d thought he was going to die, too. That time in his life had been very traumatising, and thinking back on it made him feel uneasy and drained. Time had passed twice as slowly during those months. He’d expected to die at any moment, and feared going to sleep, knowing that eventually he wouldn’t wake up. Even now, the thought still crossed his mind when he went to bed. Was he going to die in his sleep? Wilt away like a flower that had never been watered?
He never did.
It almost felt cruel. If his mate had died, then why did he still live? Wasn’t he meant to die, too?
But he lived on. His mark never returned, no matter how much he wished it would, and he never died either. It took him years before he felt normal again. He learned to ignore the blank space on his wrist, often wearing a band or bangle to hide it, and he made himself learn to love things again. His mother taught him to love cooking, and his father taught him to love the sea. Every evening for years after his mark left, all of his siblings would walk him down to the beach and teach him how to weave shells into necklaces, how to find sea glass amongst the rocky stretch of pools between the tide and the cliffs.
When he was older, the age most people set out to find their mates, he started making things to occupy himself. His family was one of water magic, and his love for the sea was a calming balm that healed the sting of his empty wrist. He wove sculptures from the energy of the tide, twisting seawater into spirals and waves and flower petals. His little trinkets became popular, and they kept him busy.
He never really expected anything big to change in life, not since his mark disappeared. He’d stay by the sea and build his sculptures and find ways to make himself feel happy and fulfilled. Who was going to come looking for, after all, if he no longer had an identifying mark on his wrist?
Someone did come looking, though.
Lance was by the sea when he got caught up in a fight that he probably had no business being in. Out of nowhere, an injured wolf had come streaking out of the forest behind the sand dunes, running as fast as it could. Its dark fur was clumped together with blood as a wound on its side leaked. Lance was so startled by it that the half-formed sculpture between his hands shivered back into water, spilling across his lap. Right before his eyes the wolf seemed to lose its balance, tripping over its own paws. It skidded through the sand, its form changing, until there was a man slumped by Lance’s feet.
Hunters burst out from the trees, their arrows raised. Shifters were rare – no wonder he was being hunted. Lance wasn’t sure what made him do what he did, but he didn’t even hesitate before calling the power of the tides to his aid, sending a wave several metres tall hurtling across the sand. The water curved around him, forming a shield around him and the prone shifter as it slammed into the hunters. There were shouts and muffled cries as they were swallowed by the water.
A second man emerged from the trees, a cut on his bicep staining his skin red. There was a scar across his nose, and one of his arms was a prosthetic. He was breathing hard but quickly held his hands up when the water reared up at Lance’s command.
“Keith!” the man exclaimed, hurrying to the shifter’s side. Lance skittered back as he drew close, far enough that his ankles and halfway up to his knees were submerged in water.
The shifter – Keith – groaned at the sound of his name, trying to push himself upright. He opened his eyes and stared hard at Lance, his intensity so surprising that Lance felt as though he’d been shocked. Something about his gaze made Lance’s stomach squirm.
The man followed Keith’s gaze. “Thank you,” he said, glancing briefly at the hunters dotted across the sand, unconscious.
“You should leave before they wake up.” Lance felt nervous for reasons he couldn’t explain.
“It’s him, Shiro,” Keith suddenly said, a slight growl to his voice. He pushed aside Shiro’s worried hands and wobbled to his feet, his eyes moving up and down Lance like he was prey. “I can smell it. It’s him.”
Shiro’s eyebrows inched up.
Keith stalked closer, uncaring that he was getting his shoes and pants wet. “You’re our mate,” he told Lance.
For a moment, the words simply didn’t register. Then Lance felt himself go tense all over, a defensive, ugly thing rearing up inside of him. “No I’m not.”
“You are,” Keith insisted. “I can smell it on your scent. Show me your wrist.”
“No,” Lance protested. He was frozen to the spot, his heart pounding. Keith snatched for his wrists, and Lance quickly lost against him, too overwhelmed to put up much of a fight. The smooth emptiness of his inner wrists were turned up towards the sky, exposed for Keith to see.
Keith seemed surprised by what he saw – or more likely, by what he didn’t see.
Lance jerked his wrists back, his face colouring. “Happy now?” he snapped.
“Come out of the water,” Shiro urged. Something about his voice had both Keith and Lance obeying, not because the command was particularly forceful, but because the words sounded reasonable coming from Shiro, whose eyes were flickering from Keith’s wound to Lance’s twisted face and back again.
Lance didn’t leave the water, not entirely. He felt calmer as the tide lapped at his ankles.
“Can I see?” Shiro asked, glancing pointedly at Lance’s wrists.
Lance breathed out through his nose, but obligingly exposed his empty wrists again. He wasn’t sure why.
“You have no mark?”
“No,” Lance muttered, turning his wrists inwards again, hiding them.
“How long?”
“Years,” he told Shiro, who flinched with surprise. “I don’t know why I’m not dead.”
“I think I do,” Shiro said. He held out his wrists, one real and one not, and neither bore a mark.
Lance felt just as surprised as Shiro had been. “No mark?”
“It was on this arm,” Shiro explained, holding up his prosthetic. “But I lost the arm in an accident ten years ago.”
Lance was quiet for a moment. “Ten?” he whispered.
Shiro nodded.
Something dangerously close to tears burned in the back of Lance’s eyes. He swallowed the growing lump in his throat. “I… lost mine, about the same time.”
Shiro gave him a small smile. “I figured.”
“Did it look like this?” Keith asked, undoing the band around his wrist to expose the mark sitting on his skin.
Lance peered at it closely, but he couldn’t quite be sure. He didn’t want to get his hopes up, but it did look familiar. “I can’t really remember what it looked like,” he admitted. “I’d have to ask my family. But, just– how can you be sure that I’m…?”
“I had two marks,” Keith said. “One on each wrist. One disappeared ten years ago, but the other remains. Shiro recognised the mark on my wrist, but I knew that it wasn’t his one, that his one was gone. We’ve been looking for you ever since.”
Lance had never heard of someone having two marks, not even if they were part of a triad. He couldn’t deny that something strange like that seemed to fit in perfectly with them, though. Two marks, a missing arm, no mark – it was a mess. But did it mean he wasn’t alone after all?
“We can ask my Ma if the mark is the same one I had,” he tentatively offered.
“I already know it is,” Keith said, “you smell like my mate.”
“We should check, if you don’t mind,” Shiro interjected. “Not everyone can tell through smell, Keith.”
Keith just frowned at him. “I’m going to be right.”
“Let’s double check anyway, alright? And get you fixed up.”
“Just a scratch,” Keith muttered.
“That is not just a scratch,” Lance argued, looking at Keith’s torn side and the blood making his shirt stick to his skin. “I’ll take you back to the village and ask a healer to look at you, okay?”
Keith didn’t seem too keen, but Shiro accepted the other for both of them.
Lance tried not to let himself feel excited. He snuck glances at Keith’s wrist, feeling more and more certain the mark was familiar, like something in his very being recognised it. If Keith’s nose was right, then Lance would have two mates – more than he’d ever dared to hope for.
And god how he wanted it. Wanted them. Something deep in him felt like it was waking up, and it was happy to see them.
“If it helps,” Shiro said to him quietly as Lance led them back home, “I have a feeling Keith is right, too. I may not have his nose, but I’ve always trusted my instincts. I saw you and was filled with the same feeling I had when I first saw him.”
“What feeling?” Lance asked.
Shiro thought for a moment. “A feeling like… I’d come home. Or like I’d found the place I was meant to be. I’m sorry that me losing my arm made you markless.”
“You lost an entire arm,” Lance protested. “Don’t apologise.”
“I know, but being without it, not knowing why… it must have been hard.”
Lance didn’t want to admit how hard it had been, not to people who were still strangers, no matter how much it felt like all the cracks in his fragmented soul were being put back together.
“Let’s just get back to the village, okay?” He felt exhausted, and just wanted to get the two of them away from the hunters before they woke up. They’d have plenty to talk about once they’d been patched up and healed.
It seemed impossible that Lance could wake up with no mates and an empty soul, but suddenly have two. He was being given answers to questions that had always confused him about his missing his mark, and he desperately wanted to believe them. Had Shiro’s accident really caused both Lance and Keith to lose his mark? It was possible, he realised. Incredulously possible.
He breathed in deeply and tried to calm his racing heart.
Maybe he wasn’t doomed to be alone after all.