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Marcus’ eighteenth birthday was in exactly twelve minutes and thirty-eight seconds. It’s not that he’s scared, necessarily, but it’s his eighteenth birthday. The big one-eight. In twelve minutes and twenty-four seconds Marcus was going to get his soulmark. His mark to connect him to his Match for the rest of his life.
The moment a wizard turns eighteen they get a black mark somewhere on their skin. The first place their soulmate touches them after their birthday. It explodes into their soul colour afterwards, too. A visual indication of belonging.
Marcus never really cared for soulmates. He had bigger things to worry about, like Quidditch and not failing his OWLs again this year, but he couldn’t help but be nervous anyway. What if they didn’t like him? He was no stranger to people not liking him, and — contrary to apparent popular belief — he wasn’t stupid. He knew what the people at Hogwarts thought of him. Troll blood, didn’t they say?
Eleven minutes.
Marcus’ best mate, Adrian, had turned eighteen three weeks prior, and he was understandably thrilled when ‘pretty Terence from the Quidditch team’ — pretty Terence, who had woken up with his hand stained black, even though his eighteenth birthday wasn’t for another seven months — gripped his neck in greeting just a day later. Right across the mark, lighting it up in a brilliant emerald green. He had been a bit jealous, secretly. Marcus had hit him across the back of the head the first time he said ‘pretty Terence from the Quidditch team’, as if Adrian wasn’t also on the team. He had a reputation to uphold, afterall.
It was nearing midnight. Nearing the time when everything changed for him. Marcus wasn’t sure what to expect. Adrian said it felt like a hot tingling, condensed into one spot, bright and over in a flash. (“Sorta like that Deep Heat muscle relief charm. And when you touch them, it feels like a hot flash and then a soothing coolness.”)
Adrian was both incredibly accurate with his description, and incredibly blasé about it. The tingles felt more like highly concentrated pins and needles, digging into his skin up and down the length of his left arm. And his right hand. Fuck. Why does he have two soulmarks?
Marcus had never heard of people getting their soulmark in two spots.
He shook his head, trying to rationalise. Deep breath. Maybe he just touched his soulmate at the same time in two places? That’d be it, right? That had to be it. Marcus couldn’t be the freak with two soulmates. He already got enough shit from mouthy Gryffindors and haughty Ravenclaws for being less than stellar at schoolwork.
He grabbed his wand from the bedside and cast a quick Lumos, ignoring the less than pleased grunts from Adrian, Warrington, Derrick and Montague as they all rolled over in frightening synchronicity. Quidditch training drills did them good in that regard.
He chanced a glance down at his hand and- yep. There was a pitch black stain coating his hand, from the heel of his palm to the tips of his fingers. There was still the ghost of a tingle when he wiggled his fingers, trying to see how the stain changed with the shift in lighting. Cautiously, he turned his attention to his arm, he pushed up the sleeve of his green and silver knitted jumper, examining the skin of his forearm. It was stained just as dark as his palm. Merlin’s balls, there really was no denying it, was there? Either he managed to touch his soulmate at two different points at the exact same second, or he had two soulmates.
This is not what he had planned.
-
Marcus had rolled his eyes an impressive twelve times in the past eight and a half minutes. It was his birthday, people should’ve been being nice to him, but instead he was stuck with Higgs and Pucey being embarrassingly fond of one another. Like, yeah, he was happy for them or whatever but it’s his birthday, can’t they cut it out for ten minutes?
They were heading to the Quidditch pitch, just to fly around and mess about and call it ‘practise’ when they saw Wood and his prat friend heading their way. The ginger. Whatever his name was.
Marcus barely suppressed a groan. He really didn’t want to deal with this today.
Without thinking, he sped up slightly and knocked their arms together forcefully. Oliver’s face fell into a deep scowl, Marcus’ undoubtedly doing the same when they froze in tandem. Marcus’ arm had lit up. Heat crawled up his skin in the exact same place as the black stain that had bled its way into his life only thirteen hours earlier and then a wave of brilliant cold swept over it.
No. No, no, no.
This couldn’t be happening. Oliver Wood can’t be Marcus’ soulmate. That would be a cruel and unusual trick from God. Marcus really didn’t think he was that bad, he didn’t really deserve that, did he?
“...Flint. How old are you?” Oliver said, forcing the words out through painfully gritted teeth.
“It’s his birthday today, he just turned eighteen,” Terence supplied helpfully. “Why do you- Oh. Oh my god.”
Marcus was frozen, staring at Oliver with wide, frantic eyes. Slowly, he lifted his hand to unclasp his robes, he let them fall to the ground so that he was standing there in only his shirt and trousers. He rolled up the left sleeve of his rumpled white shirt with trembling hands. The skin on his arm was no longer marred by an inky black tattoo, instead it was a shimmering, brilliant gold.
“Percy, what the fuck just happened?” Oliver asked, a touch of hysteria bleeding into his strained voice.
Percy looked between the two of them, calculating. Something clicked behind his eyes. He stayed quiet.
“Marcus,” Adrian started slowly, eyes locked onto his palm, “You still have an untouched mark.”
Oliver’s eyes snapped up from where they were staring at his arm to stare at his face, “you what?”
“I have two soulmates,” Marcus whispered, voice breaking as he choked out the words.
He had never felt this way before. He was terrified. Oliver was his soulmate, but he still had another one out there, somewhere. He and Oliver hated each other, how were they supposed to be soulmates.
What if Oliver didn’t want him because he couldn’t give all of his soul to him?
“I think,” Oliver started, before clearing his throat, “I think we should have a chat, hm?”
Marcus nodded silently, not trusting himself to speak.
“We’ll leave you to it, then?” Terence asked softly.
Marcus nodded again. He’d have to deal with this whole ordeal eventually, might as well be sooner rather than later.
Oliver kept walking the way he was going before Marcus had knocked into him, Percy following with ease. Marcus scrambled to catch up, tossing a comically scared look over his shoulder to Adrian and Terence that he would deny with indignant vehemence in the months to come.
Oliver pulled him bodily into the library, manhandling him into a seat and staring at him with a withering gaze.
“You’re going to be extremely fucking quiet and I’m going to speak first, okay?”
Marcus, wisely, kept his mouth shut and nodded his head quickly.
“Good. First of all, what the fuck? Okay, we’re soulmates, I can work with that. It’s weird but I can work with it, we’ll get to know each other, we’ll get used to each other. I’ll still annihilate you in Quidditch. But- You have two soulmates. I only have one mark. So I have to share your soul with someone else while you get all of me? I hardly think that’s fair.”
Marcus opened his mouth to interject, but one glare from Oliver had him shutting it again.
“You’re going to have to call me Oliver now, by the way. I refuse to let my soulmate call me Wood. I’m calling you Marcus from now on, too, and you’re just going to have to deal with it.”
“Ollie,” Percy interrupted, ignoring the glare he received in return. “I have a theory.”
Oliver sighed and tilted his head, “Go on then, you bloody Ravenclaw.”
Percy rolled his eyes, “Flint- Marcus, I’d like to offer a truce between us. You’re Oliver’s soulmate, I’m Oliver’s best friend. I have a feeling we’ll be around each other quite frequently.”
He carefully extended his right hand. The palm was black, a stark contrast against his milky white skin.
Marcus eyed it carefully before throwing caution to the wind. He gripped Percy’s hand in his own, and felt the rush of heat erupting from their point of contact. He watched as Percy’s lips twitched up into a small, satisfied smile.
“As I suspected.”
Oliver watched, brow furrowed.
The two of them released their hands, Marcus revealed a warm orange in place of the black stain. Percy’s own palm was a deep green.
“So, I’m sharing you with Percy? I always thought Percy would be my soulmate, I didn’t expect there to be a bridge between us.”
“Ollie, I have a feeling that on your eighteenth birthday we’re going to wake up with a new mark.”
“What?”
“Think about it. Marcus is the eldest, he’s just turned eighteen so he got his soulmarks, and we both woke up with the corresponding stain. But you and I are still seventeen. You’ll be eighteen in two months, which is a week before my own birthday. I can’t have your soulmark on my body, because you’re not old enough to form the link yet.”
Oliver’s face melted into understanding, “so, you think we’re all soulmates and we just have to wait for our own confirmation?”
“I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it? We’ve been dating — don’t give me that look, we may not have given it a name but that’s what it is — we’ve been dating already for, like, three years. I think the universe can give us this one.”
Marcus was quiet, processing. “What does this mean for me? I mean, you two are solid and we’ve never been on the best terms. I understand if you want to ignore the second mark. I can’t imagine having two soulmates to be easy.”
“Don’t be a fucking idiot, Marcus, you’re stuck with us,” Oliver said, rolling his eyes. “You can’t get away that easy.”
-
Marcus was shivering as he climbed the stairs to the Gryffindor common room. It was far from the first time he had snuck in since his birthday two months before, and he’s sure it’s far from the last.
Surprisingly, the gay thing was the least difficult thing to wrap his head around. He had never really thought about romance before all of the soulmate malarky, always too focused on Quidditch to care. Figuring out that he was more into blokes than birds didn’t exactly shatter his worldview. It was more the multiple soulmates thing. But he came around to that fairly quickly, all things considered. It was mostly the Wood and Weasley thing, but again he dealt with it pretty well, and with only minor ribbing from both the Slytherin and Gryffindor Quidditch teams.
He got to the Fat Lady’s portrait and leaned against the wall, ignoring her disgruntled whispers as he waited for one of his boyfriends to let him in. There were only six minutes to midnight, and he’d be damned if he missed the first minutes of Oliver's birthday. They had to know if they were right.
The portrait swung open to reveal Percy standing in his pyjamas, ushering Marcus in quickly.
“Hurry up, hurry up!”
Marcus stepped through, and into the warm Gryffindor common room. He would never get used to how warm they kept it up here as opposed to in the dungeons.
He grinned, lopsided and easy, “Hi.”
Percy rolled his eyes, as he seemed to do often, but couldn’t keep the fond grin off his face, “yes, yes, hello. Ollie’s waiting in the dorm.”
Marcus waited, staring at Percy expectantly.
“Marcus, we don’t have time for this.”
He was just being stubborn, the git. Marcus raised a single eyebrow, staying rooted to the ground.
Percy huffed a sigh, sounding entirely too put out about kissing his boyfriend hello, but leaned in to press a soft kiss to the skin of Marcus’ cheek.
Marcus let out a quiet whine, “Perce!”
Percy grinned cheekily, “Not until we get back to the dorm.”
Marcus hurried over to the stairs, pulling Percy along behind him, “Best hurry then, huh?”
Percy bit back a laugh, following him easily. Just before they began to walk up the steps, Marcus twirled him around and brought him into a gentle kiss. Percy hummed into it for a moment, before pulling away and fixing Marcus with a glare.
"Behave."
Oliver was waiting, sitting on his bed.
“Took you two long enough,” he muttered.
“Sorry Ollie,” Marcus grinned, clambering up to sit next to him and pressing a quick kiss to his lips.
“No you’re not, I bet you accosted him in the common room.”
Marcus winked, visible even in the low light.
“One more minute,” Percy said, squeezing onto the bed besides the two of them.
They counted down the seconds together, tangled together in the comfortable warmth of Oliver and Percy’s dorm room. Marcus a buffer between Percy and Oliver, the two of them not touching in any way. They wanted to have a second before their first touch.
“Three,” Marcus whispered.
“Two,” Percy whispered.
“One,” Oliver whispered.
And then he gasped, staring down at his hand. He watched as the skin of his palm turned black. They were right, he had a second soulmate. Percy’s answering gasp was enough to make tears well in Oliver’s eyes.
The three of them. Together. Fully.
Marcus cast a Lumos charm, flashing back briefly to his own birthday.
“I’ve thought a lot about where I wanted to touch you first, after getting our marks,” Oliver mumbled.
“What if we were wrong and you got your hopes up for nothing? I forced myself not to think about it.”
“We weren’t though. I wanted us to match,” he replied, leaning over to brush his hand against Percy’s shoulder. “All three of us now. A palm and an arm.”
All three of them. Marcus liked the sound of that.