Chapter Text
Darcy Lewis was always an extraordinary child. She learnt to talk early, walk early, she could count to a hundred before her nursery classmates could reach ten, but she was one of those lucky people who could be extraordinary without it making her conceited.
Even her words developed early. Mary Lewis noticed a grey tinge on her daughter’s arm when she was only four years old, when they normally developed at six or seven at the earliest. Hearing his wife’s scream, Jack Lewis ran into Darcy’s room to find the pair sitting on the floor; prodding and stretching the skin by her elbow, but to no avail. The words were too small and blurred to read yet but by the looks of it there were a lot of them.
“Will he talk to me first then mommy?”
“Looks like it, sweetie.”
In Darcy’s world, one pair of a soulmate bond – the second to speak between them – had the first words spoken by either of them permanently tattooed on their right arm, and the person who spoke first would have their match’s name on their left. Her mother had “Excuse me miss, is this your purse? … Wow you’re – you’re so beautiful” on her right wrist, and her father had been born with “Mary Dennings” on his right, which changed to “Mary Lewis” after they married.
If the concept of soulmates had a poster couple, it would be Mary and Jack. They were perfect for each other in every way, had fallen in love within the first day of their meeting, had been married within a year and before their third anniversary they had three children: William, Darcy, and Katherine.
William was almost a year older than Darcy, and Katherine just over a year younger. The girls had always been close, but when Darcy got her words before her brother did, the two of them drifted apart. His jealousy got in the way of any sibling attachment that used to be there, even though they were only little. The envy didn’t last all that long however, as just before Darcy’s fifth birthday the words became clear enough to read, and her short-sleeved tops were handed down to Katherine and replaced with longer ones.
No parent would want those words to be visible.
“Shut up! Those people have guns and I’m sure they’d love to kill you so button it or you’ll get us both killed. Understood? Fuckin’ hell.”
Knowing that one day your daughter would be in that type of danger is any parent’s worst nightmare, especially when she’s still practically a baby.
“At least there’s no chance of a false match” her mother sighed, resting her face in her hands, “She’s only going to be told that once so there wouldn’t be any doubt.”
Her husband reached out and took her hand, “it’s not like your words, you had men tripping over themselves to call you beautiful.”
She smiled warmly back at him, rubbing her thumb over his knuckles. Neither of them voicing the shared thought ringing round their heads like an alarm.
What if they’re the last words she hears?
Darcy and her brother grew closer for a while after her words became legible, the jealousy dissipating as soon as the kids were all told to keep her words a secret. None of them really understood why they were so shameful, in fact Darcy frequently daydreamed of a superhero-type person rescuing her from a bank robbery or alien invasion, but her parents hated her so much as mentioning them, and she soon stopped. From then on, she only shared her dreams with her sister who drank them in with wide eyes and asked for more, but always kept them secret.
By the time Darcy was eleven she was used to hiding her words and deflecting whenever anyone asked about them. She kept her sleeves long and her shrug noncommittal, and eventually people stopped asking. They stopped talking to her altogether actually. She was in sixth grade but her only friends were adults, her peers seemingly put off by her silence. Instead she turned to books, and buried herself in science and maths instead of friends and gossip.
Even at home she was relatively lonely. William barely spoke to her after his came in when he was eight, a “hi” by his right shoulder. He complained for days after it showed up, saying it was “too vague” and “Darce isn’t gonna miss her soulmate, I’m gonna meet a thousand million people who could be mine and I might miss them!"
She couldn’t help but feel sorry for her parents, they had one kid with incredibly specific words about guns and danger, one with the vaguest word possible, and Katherine passed her tenth birthday without any at all, which meant she would probably never get them.
One night, Darcy heard her parents talking late at night and snuck out to the landing to listen from the stairs.
“I don’t know what to do Jack!”
“We don’t need to do anything, love. We’ll be okay,” she saw her dad moving to the kitchen doorway to hug his wife.
“You don’t know that!” her mother’s voice was muffled by her dad’s shirt but the broken whisper still carried up the stairs to where Darcy was sat, “Half the people with no soulmates don’t have one because they die before they can meet them! And half the people with ones as common as “hi” have those because it’s easy for whoever it is to have a new soulmate if something happens!”
“Ssshh love, it’s okay.”
“How can you say it’s okay when the only child we have who will definitely meet their soulmate will meet them surrounded by guns and people who want to kill her?! For all we know she’s going to die a second after they meet!”
“Sweetheart-”
“Don’t sweetheart me! I know we’ve both been thinking it since we first read them!”
Darcy saw her dad’s shoulders slump, and a cold, sick, dread pooled in her stomach. Her parents thought she was going to die? She thought they were ashamed of them, but she’d always seen them as exciting and brave, not dangerous. She heard footsteps on the stairs below her and scarpered back to bed, but stayed awake the rest of the night.
In the morning she could barely look her parents in the eye. She didn’t want to tell them what she’d overheard, or the thoughts that had kept her from sleeping.
If her parents thought something bad was going to happen, did that mean Will and Katherine would die? That’s what her mum seemed to think at any rate. But would her parents die too? Would she? She’d at least meet her soulmate first, but what if her soulmate died? What if her soulmate died and she survived? What if he died saving her? Or would she be like one of the people who die in Doctor Who and the Doctor continues anyway? What if she dies and he doesn’t know she’s his soulmate?
The next few days she ran on autopilot, getting up, going to school, coming home, bluffing her way through conversation at dinner, going to bed early and not sleeping.
It stayed on her mind constantly for about a week, until she had to start studying for a test and realised that she hadn’t felt anxious with her nose buried in a book.
After that she began to stay at school at the end of the day, hidden in a corner of the library to do homework and her own research about computers and artificial intelligence. Before long, the librarian began to call her ‘Matilda’, and would bring her books from the senior section of the high school library.
She would get home just before dinner and as soon as the dishes were done, she would sneak upstairs to study some more before getting some sleep if she could. Her parents would encourage her to come downstairs more often and she did, but always with that same anxiety she felt the night she heard them talking. And she got straight As, so they couldn’t complain too much.
On the most part she was happy, but she couldn’t help but wonder how long it would last.