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Mac thought it could be Tomas, for a while. It isn’t, never was, but he was convinced for more years than he wants to think about. They’re both bleeding and watching feather-soft petals float to the icy streets day after day, barely able to tell where the flowers are coming from between the snow and shadows. It should have been easier, maybe, to tell, but—
It isn’t, is the point.
But in the years when he thinks it might be, Mac fights a lot. He was fighting before then, vicious and starving and furious with everyone else in this goddamn filthy city, and always wondered what his soulmate made of that. But even after, when he was living in the warmest corner of a freezing warehouse, every night was another performance in bruised knuckles and shattered glass and another fight with Tomas about both. It was Alessia that sat him down and said she’d save him some trouble and kill him herself if he bled on their floor one more time.
It didn’t stop him, because nothing did. But he made sure to scrub the blood from his face with fistfuls of snow before coming home, felt the cold burn right into the scrapes there, and it was good enough. Or, if it wasn’t, Alessia only ever watched with heavy eyes and the air of somebody waiting for a funeral and didn’t say a word.
So good enough.
By the time he realizes that not many of those flowers in the snow were his at all, that he’s probably drowning somebody out there in delicate petals that they’d never asked for, it’s too late to do anything about it. Had always been too late, probably, but there’s something about the stinging shame that he can’t shake off. He doesn’t have a choice anymore, has to fight like any of the other dogs in Caddel’s circus, and those are the nights when he hopes his soulmate’s dead or at least not the slightest bit allergic to pollen.
Those are the same nights when sometimes he’d find a daffodil tucked away in his hair and crush it between his fingers just to make sure it was real.
Sometimes weeks would go by with nothing, not so much as a petal, and relief and anxiety would run down his spine in equal measure because maybe this was it. Maybe he’d finally done something that lost him a soulmate, and he wouldn’t be wrecking somebody when Caddel finally killed him.
But then a forget-me-not would bloom between his own bruised knuckles, and he would wonder if they were out there bleeding on the streets too. It’s comforting, in a way, how often daisies and baby’s breath tangles with his fingers—how often their knuckles must be bleeding. At the very least it means they must know how to throw a punch by now, and he always catches himself thinking maybe, somehow, that means they can—
The thought slips by quickly, as always.
And then he’s older, calmer, has slit Caddel’s throat and is doing less fighting than you’d expect of a traitor. He figures his soulmate must be doing the same, except every once in a while—and then more often, and Mac would be concerned if he wasn’t irritated—there’s suddenly a rose garden between his palms, laurel twining around his temple. Flowers growing out across his tongue, chrysanthemums swelling off his bottom lip and he wonders vaguely how often someone can get punched in the face before they get better at dodging. But he’s not an idiot, knows he doesn’t have the right to say shit about it, so instead he’s just spitting delicate purple hyacinths out from between his teeth and halfway wishing he could just take the punch instead.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wonders if his soulmate loses sleep over the days without flowers too. They’re growing more frequent, he knows, because he’s made a fortress of Foxden and spends more and more time spinning his web from inside its walls. He’d like to think that it maybe makes up for the years and years of gifting them a flower shop every other week, but he knows better than that too.
He wonders if the flowers his soulmate bleeds ever spell out an apology, but he doesn’t let himself think about that one often. Less, as the Jackeyes snarl their way towards winter once again and the chances that someone slides another knife between his ribs get higher and higher, until sometimes he’s not thinking about it at all. Just dragging his way through night after endless night, reworks his wards morning after morning and counts heads every afternoon.
It’s the start to another one of those long nights, and Mac is already tired. Kamala is looming over his shoulder, lurking in the shadows to make sure he doesn’t kill whoever’s in the hot seat this time—ostensibly to make sure they don’t kill him, actually, but they all know better—and doing wonders at not audibly sighing her impatience. He makes a note to give her a bonus, because god knows he wants a bonus for sitting through this.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the man in front of him is both tragically unimportant and wildly incompetent, and that the past two hours have been a massive waste of everyone’s time. Altogether, a waste of a reason to move Foxden for the third time in as many months, Mac knows, and doesn’t let the frustration crawl any higher than his throat.
But he’s going to see the damn thing through, because he has to. And so he rolls the pen between his gloved fingers, doesn’t pull his gaze from the rat squirming in his seat, and braces himself for the next half hour.
He feels it before it starts, a too-familiar buzz under his skin, and spares a stab of irritation because really, now? He has a job to do, visitors to intimidate, and couldn’t they wait another fifteen minutes before tripping or whatever—
But there’s an uneasiness in his gut, something uncertain as the feeling starts to coil up his spine. He doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, and the man across the desk just keeps talking more and more nervously as the silence stretches on.
Kamala doesn’t need to see his face to notice, because she never has. Between one exhale and the next, as the pull-twist-burn continues to grow over his ribs, his back, his arms, she has the visitor up and out of the room, shoving him at the twins that are waiting there. The door is shut and she’s back at his shoulder before he can blink, and normally he’d snap about using powers when they’re not necessary, but he’s not even sure if she was using them or if just didn’t notice her crossing the room.
“What’s happening?” she asks, quiet and intent. She’s not reaching out, just hovering at his side, two heartbeats away from getting Siobhan or a healer or whatever miracle he asks for tonight, and I’ve never been luckier to end up on the wrong end of someone’s knife, Mac thinks, in a moment of gratitude that’s almost choking him, making the air stick in his throat and maybe that’s the panic actually, because he can’t answer her, can only shake his head and drop the pen as he sits up straighter—
The faint clink as it hits the desk is deafening. He can’t hear anything else.
There’s a discomfort, a type of swelling happening along his spine as thorns are dragged out from beneath his skin. He pulls his jacket off because it suddenly feels a thousand pounds too heavy, feels like it’s splitting at the seams, and flower petals come fluttering to the ground. They’re bursting from under his collar, falling from the hem of his shirt, and they just keep spiraling along his ribcage like parasites. He can’t see his tattoos, loses the familiar fox and the crow and the salamander between the flowers.
Fuck, he thinks, and doesn’t say anything at all.
They start climbing up his shoulders, close like fingers around his throat, and Kamala is watching him with massive eyes. He’s pulling his gloves off, doesn’t know where he drops them, just knows he needs to see it—
There’s tiny ones spilling from his palms, his fingertips, out along his forearm and they keep coming. Sweet pea and pansies and violets, shreds of brilliant colors like confetti falling over his pens and papers until he can’t see anything else.
For a wild moment, he wonders if his soulmate is drowning, if his lungs are filling with bright red poppies too, and Kamala turns away because she’s kinder than she should be.
The sunflowers come last, like shreds of sunlight falling from his throat. They curl around his jaw, fall against his collarbone, brush gentle petals across his cheek as if they’re trying to apologize.
There’s so many flowers.
Scattered across his floor, his desk, his hands. They’re piling up across his papers, collecting across the floorboards. The pile just keeps growing and growing, and there’s enough to hide his stained fingers, cover his desk, bury a whole body—
There’s so many fucking flowers.
Kamala isn’t looking at him. She’s staring at the floor, where the flowers are starting to spill over the edge of Mac’s desk. Slowly, like she’s using up all the air in the room, she bends to pick up a single delicate flower between her fingers. It’s delicate, white like lace caught in a blood splatter, and Mac doesn’t have the first idea what it is.
Kamala is looking at it like she does, and that’s more than enough.
“I’m sorry,” Kamala says at last. Her voice is very quiet, soft like she means it. Mac doesn’t look over, because he knows she does. He just lifts a hand to brush the hydrangea from his shoulder and watch it drift to the floor like snow.
“I expected it,” and it isn’t a lie. The words feel hollow on his tongue, empty because of course he expected. Child of war, son of hate and vicious bitter streets, there was never anyone out there that could possibly make it to him. Soulmates never ended well in their family, always ended with blood on the floor or cracked windows, and he’d never expected to be different.
He only expected that he’d be dead before he had to worry about that. That it would be the other way around, a final goodbye in the form of a garden for someone he never met, and maybe they’d be grateful. And then he survived, and had to think, had to believe that his would be different, because—
Kamala doesn’t say another word, and he doesn’t get a single thing done, just sits there and picks the pen back up before he loses it in the garden his soulmate’s grown for him.
“Phone, Mac,” Kamala is saying, and he’s picking it up because he has to, because that’s the second phone and those are usually important, and he’s right today.
It takes three solid seconds to piece through what’s being said, to place the distantly familiar voice, and it’s only halfway because they’re unsteady and stumbling in their haste to say everything at once.
But he doesn’t need to hear the words to understand. There’s nothing he’s more familiar with than please, any deal, anything, and he’s agreeing because there’s nothing he’s better at than pulling the impossible together for a deal.
“Southside one,” he says, once he’s hung up and is flicking through his files. He’s going to have to clean out his drawer after this. The thought and his voice both feel distant. “Price, needs healing and transport for two. Take Siobhan.”
Kamala inclines her head and blinks out of sight as soon as he reads off the address. She’ll be back just as quickly, he knows, and the situation is probably handled between her and Siobhan. But he glances at the mountain of flowers at his feet once and hauls himself up.
He wears the coat and fixes his shirt, because the flowers aren’t even starting to slow down, and maybe he can make it a little less obvious that he’s someone whose soulmate is dying in a ditch somewhere. Zig is lingering outside of his office and jumps when the door opens, guilty and frantic and sullen all at once, and he doesn’t stop her from following him or from saying a thousand things back-to-back as she does. None of it sticks, but she’s not saying a word about the flowers and is telling him something about Zee instead, and he’s almost impressed with the tact there.
She definitely didn’t learn it from him.
Damien Price, he tries to remember as he makes his way through the familiar halls. Damien Price, Dimer, quiet and too clever for his own good, a brilliant disaster waiting to happen. A disaster that has happened, if the desperation over the phone was anything to go by, and Mac doesn’t have it in him to pity that today.
The room is familiar too. Reinforced, the wards there spun deep, made to contain every one of his Jackeyes even when they’re getting stitched back together. It’s crowded today, even more so when he sweeps in with Zig a half-step behind, and he lets himself click into that cold familiarity. Business is business, work has to be done, and he’s made a deal tonight.
He realizes all at once.
And from the way their brother is crying, Mac has to assume this person is loved. He’s kind, he must be, there has to be something about him worth loving, and for the first time that night there’s bile burning at the back of Mac’s throat. He’s bleeding their morning glories from his jaw down to his ribs, can feel ivy and yew where their spine should be, and their brother is rattling the wards carved into the walls with every word pouring out of him.
Faintly, Mac wonders if he should turn on his heel and walk right back to his office. Because fate isn’t kind, not to him and not to soulmates, and it feels like testing something too big to even think that—
He’s pulled fate apart at the seams every day of his life. He stays.
Siobhan is already there, Kamala in her shadow. The former is sitting by the stranger, taking up half the room even when she’s not a bear. He meets her gaze, doesn’t think for a moment about what’s hiding there, nods at the goddamn kid that’s sold himself out for their help. The kid is saying something as he’s being pulled out, words spilling out of him like insects, and Mac couldn’t repeat a single one if he tried.
“We made a deal,” he says instead, cold and sharp, trusts that it’ll cover all the bases. “And we’ll keep it. You need to stay out of the way.” And he hears the response to that one, the dead silence and the choked please and he’s not sure how to even start to have this conversation but Siobhan doesn’t give him the chance before she’s dragging the kid somewhere quiet and well-warded. Because Mac’s nothing if not prepared, and the thought makes him reel for a second before he drags himself back to this corner of Foxden.
“Zig,” he says quietly, and his eyes don’t leave the mess on the bed, “Desk drawer, bottom right. Get me the bag there.”
And Zig doesn’t even hesitate, just takes off. He can hear the distant thud of her footsteps, and spares a moment to be grateful. Kamala stands at the foot of the cot as he takes the empty seat, and he can hear the words she’s swallowing back.
“This isn’t going to be easy,” she tells him, and he can hear the don’t get your hopes up.
“A deal’s a deal,” he replies, because I never do, and the silence is liar.
But she’s a standing sentry as Zig scrabbles back into the room, out of breath. The twin is handing him the bag like it’ll explode, and she’s not right but he’d rather she keeps treating it that way. He nods at her, the closest to voicing that gratitude he can get tonight—most nights, and sometimes he wonders if she’ll forgive him for that one day—flicks his eyes back at the door, and he’s not sure what exactly tips her off not to protest but she doesn’t. He unfolds the leather carefully, layer after layer, quicker and less neatly than he’d hope, but a deal’s a deal and a soulmate’s a soulmate.
The brushes are ancient. The wood is polished and fine and rigorously preserved. He can’t remember if the bristles were ever pristine, and they certainly aren’t now. But that isn’t the point, it isn’t about being pristine, and he could almost laugh at how the city has proved that yet again tonight. It’s the only thing from that apartment, the only thing he has that his mother touched, and he’s not sure if he wants to think about that for long.
He pulls the stopper from the ink. He can almost hear, in the back of his mind, wasting it, you’re wasting it, but he just puts the cork aside and pulls the first brush free from the ancient leather.
There’s a memory, there.
He doesn’t know where to start, but that’s never stopped him before. The first line begins on the shoulder, where he can still see skin that’s not broken, and he moves from there. And then all of a sudden it’s like he can breathe again, because this he knows, this he can do, even if it’s never been on someone else’s skin like this, even if they’re temporary—
He keeps going. Ward after ward, sigil after sigil, prayers to a god he doesn’t know in ink and flower petals.
There’s a moment when he stills and can’t tell if their ribs are moving. He freezes, sees the brush dip down ever so slightly, and exhales along with the stranger.
“If this is a waste of ink, I’m killing you myself,” he tells his soulmate, and it sounds sharp hanging in the air. There’s no response, and he’s grateful beyond belief for that. He feels eyes on him, heavy and unwavering, and he refuses to look away from his work to meet them.
“Get Ava,” he tells Kamala instead. There’s only so much he’ll be able to do, only so much he can prevent from here. Ava owes them a favor and a secret and isn’t afraid of Tomas, and someone will need to reverse what’s already been punctured and torn.
And if he’s about to watch his soulmate die, he doesn’t want—
He’s not sure what, and that’s almost more frightening, but he doesn’t want Kamala to know either. She doesn’t say a word , disappears into the shadows like she was never there.
The room is empty. It’s just him and his dying soulmate, the marigolds peppering their matted hair.
He thinks about saying something. About the fact he might never get a chance to.
He keeps painting.
It’s getting harder, because every time he shifts the stranger’s hands, more petals slip between his own red-slick fingers. But they’re completely still the entire time, their breaths shallow and sometimes strangled, and in some ways this is the easiest patient he’s had in years. Except he’s lying, and he has to keep returning to the same lines over and over again because they’re fading to ash almost as fast as he can paint them, and that sends an almost-forgotten chill down his spine. It’s still early, proper night only just barely yawning over the city, but his fingers are already going leaden and cold with exhaustion. The taste of magic—his magic, sharp like rum and raspberries—hangs heavy and cloying in the air, and it’s still not enough to drown out the scent of the bleeding garden spilling across his floor.
The stinging up across his shoulder blades feels familiar in a different way now. It feels like threads unravelling, embroidery pulling free, and it’s been a long time since he’s poured enough of himself into something to start eating away at those wards. And the stranger is still bleeding around each fresh one he coaxes to life.
It’s only fair, he thinks, it’s only fair. He has no idea how many times he’s made his soulmate—this one, the one right in front of him, his soulmate—sit in a garden of his own brutal indifferent design. But it’s been too many times, he knows that, and so this is only fair. He paints the same symbol for the eight time, one of the hazy half-remembered ones that don’t work with sharpie but for some reason do with his mother’s brushes, the one for stay-still-breathe-slow, and watches it start to fade before he’s finished it.
A carnation flutters from his wrist. It’s pale pink and beautiful and then the ink and scarlet start seeping into its petals. He tosses it aside. The stranger shifts for the first time then, half an inch and it’s immediately followed by a sound that’s cracked halfway through, and Mac almost shakes him.
“Don’t,” he snaps, and there’s no response because they’re still bleeding to death inside Mac’s home. But the sound of his own voice, rough and rasping against his throat on the way out, gives him pause anyway.
The brushes aren’t working fast enough. They’re precise even when they’re not pristine, concentrated ways to paint protection against the endless bleeding, but they’re not working fast enough and if Kamala’s not back yet then it means it’s going to be a long while still. He shuts his eyes for a moment and gives up, sets the brushes, presses his fingers into the ink.
It’s freezing against his fingertips.
Cold as hell, and it’s creeping up his veins like ice, maybe corrupting or maybe a shot of something strong enough to strip the filth clean of his bloodstream. He winces, hisses a curse as the ink spreads up to his knuckles greedily. There’s a flare of panic then, when he can’t make it stop for a single hollow second, just watches as it tries to travel up, staining his skin higher and higher and reaching—
And then he forces the air out of his lungs. There’s an audible crackle in the air, Foxden herself groaning under the weight as he snaps his wards back up. The ink stops where it is, frostbite snarling and hateful but under control and almost invisible under the camellias winding around his thumb, and he lets himself take two, three heartbeats to recover before packing it up into a crisp envelope to handle tomorrow. Fourth heartbeat, fifth, still too fast, but they’re both running out of time.
And then he reaches out to the stranger.
They’re warm. Radiating heat like the summer sun against his palms.
Mac steels himself and then starts re-tracing the lines once more. The magic spilling into the ink is messy, uncontrolled and howling, and he lets it slip even more. The walls around him creak, the strength of the wards there tested as he pours magic like kerosene into his soulmate. And with something else, maybe, because he’s not sure what he’s choking on but there has to be something else, another reason why his wards keep crumbling, and either he’s going to figure it out or grow two graves here.
Unclean magic, that voice scoffs, filthy and wasteful, and Mac shoves it aside because if it’s anyone’s fault that he’s fucking terrible with his soulmate before even meeting them—
But it’s right, in a way, because he can taste the twist of something unfamiliar in the air. It was imperceptible before, swallowed by the smell of blood and the fucking flowers, but it’s there. Mac tears his eyes away from the disaster that’s his soulmate for the first time since he walked into the room, letting his unfocused eyes travel around the room.
He’s not usually deep enough for this, to see the delicate spiderwebs of his wards spinning through the air. There’s so many of them in Foxden, spiraling and overlapping and winding together into something impenetrable, safe like nothing else in the world. And right now he can see that clear as day, the way they glint in the flickering light of this dusty room. He sprawls his magic out like a wave, follows the threads out and tugs at them, feels them hum in response. Steady, he thinks, and lets that sink into him.
He turns back to the stranger. Finds the wards there, almost radioactive with the amount of power flooded into them, and then watches as they’re splintered apart.
No, he thinks, slow with dawning realization, not splintered. Corroded.
And then he’s cursing, because he hasn’t been this careless in years, couldn’t afford to be so stupid in ages, but he’s got time, maybe has enough, maybe can—
He flicks the knife from his pocket, watches the chrysanthemum—familiar, so familiar—unfurl in his soulmate’s palm in response. There’s something stuck in his throat at that, but then he’s mixing the ink with the scarlet dripping from his own fingers, because some magic is stronger when it’s bleeding, and he’s drawing the right wards this time.
Contain-lessen-ease, wards to strangle the magic out of a meta in the gentlest ways he knows how, wards he’s learned to make kinder because the twins needed him to. Layers and layers and layers of it, overlapping and coiled together and some of these he’s making up as he goes because he still doesn’t believe in fate, but if it’s going to drop his soulmate—cracked and bleeding and beyond saving—at his door, then he’s going to prove it wrong tonight too.
And it works.
He’s brushing the impatiens from his hair, trying to keep the ink out of his eyes, and the stranger coughs like someone that can feel how much it hurts.
“Don’t move,” Mac is snapping before it even filters through the haze of magic and blurred vision, and then the stranger is choking around his next breath and realization hits Mac all at once. He can feel the fresh flowers at his collarbone and ribs and is tempted to snarl something else, but he’s too busy drawing out painless-gentle-breathe and exhaling when the stranger doesn’t shatter with their next breath.
Only then does he realize that he can see green under the tangle of hair and stray petals, that his soulmate is half-dead and barely held together but looking back at him. They’re inhaling, trying to say something, and Mac’s not sure what the first proper sentence he says to his soulmate is but it’s sharp and rough with something that feels like glass in his chest.
And then they close their eyes, drift into a kinder sleep, and Mac finally collapses back in his seat. The room is silent. He can feel his wards, bright and humming and strong, and he can hear his soulmate breathing steady for the first time since he set foot in the room.
He brushes the flowers from his eyes, waits until he’s sure they’re not going to grow back.
“Victor Price,” he says, because he’s finally remembered his soulmate’s goddamn name, and his voice sounds like it’s been dragged through the streets but there’s something about knowing, something about maybe hoping—
“If you’re this high-maintenance every day, I’m throwing you back to the streets,” he tells them, and he’s lying through his teeth.
There’s a string of poppies winding their way between his fingers, brilliant crimson against the ink.
He leaves them there.