Work Text:
When Charlie Spring first realises he has a soulmate, it’s not through the class that every school-age kid is given when they are 5 years old so that they know that soulmates are even a thing, but when several smiley faces appear on his fingers when he’s 7.
He’s just in class when his hand starts to feel weird and upon turning it over, finds three identical smiling faces on his writing hand, index, middle and ring. It’s quite funny actually, but he stifles a childish giggle so he doesn’t disturb anyone around him.
It’s the first drawing he’s ever gotten, so he can’t help but excitedly show Tori when he meets up with her outside at lunch. She laughs at it, which makes him a little down, but older sisters can be mean, so he just holds his head high and keeps staring at it for the next few days till the ink becomes smeared and the first tangible proof he’s got a proper friend melts away.
The second time he sees a lot of drawings at once, is a few years later when his left arm feels wobbly and jelly-like before going back to normal.
It’s not like his soulmate ever stopped drawing in the interim, smiley faces and little flowers and leaves becoming the new normal for his Mum to find on his skin, but this time it feels weird and before he knows it, over the course of the day, his whole arm is covered in a sleeve of get well wishes with names he’s never heard of or seen, little doodles next to them.
It’s like he’s gotten a full-blown tattoo sleeve after a while and Tao teases him about it when they meet up in class (“Ooh, looks like someone’s soulmate got a broken arm!”), but he doesn’t care, just like last time.
He won’t admit it, but as he’s getting older, he’s starting to lose faith in finding someone who might just like him for him as well, he’s not exactly into girls. Never has been. So unless this is one very creative, but very clumsy boy that’s managing to break arms and draw out his best impression of an English country garden on him, whoever of the female variety that is finding his skin a canvas is going to be sorely disappointed.
He hopes that he might be wrong.
There’s a lull in the drawings in the years that follow.
Sure, they show up here and there as doodles do, once in a blue moon, but nothing significant. Charlie even takes it upon himself to secretly draw out a few very amature hearts and place them down his thumb where he knows they will be seen by the other marking his skin and he gets one very large one back on his palm after a day or two along with a kiss and a hug that he snaps a photo of on his phone for posterity before it fades the next day and wipes off the face of the Earth the day after.
There were even a few months where there were no drawings at all and that worries him to the point where he wrote the word ‘Okay’ with a question mark following it on the very back of his hand, only to get a rather short response of ‘Fine’ under it in different writing followed by a hastily drawn smiley face beside it that says otherwise, but Charlie doesn’t pry.
His soulmate’s business is theirs, not his. He’s just hoping they’re okay, so in the meantime, he keeps up with drawing hearts. They seem to help, if the number of drawings that he receives back has anything to say about it.
There’s one of the Eiffel Tower on his forearm, flowers on the tips of his fingers and even the crude drawing of a dog using his index fingers and thumb for a mouth, an ear stretching out to just behind the latter, moving when he moved his hand with it and giggling like a girl. Eventually, after those few months of back and forth, he receives another word, one that he knows well enough that it makes him smile sadly at it before going back to his homework.
‘Thanks XO’
Everything’s gone wrong and it seems that his soulmate can feel his pain. He’s dealing with the fallout of being forced to come out at the boy’s school that’s been his home for a couple of years now when it happens.
He’s just there, buried under the covers and sobbing for a good 10 minutes after the week’s events when he uncovers himself to reach for his phone to see the time and instead sees the word ‘Okay?’ on his arm instead of him writing it this time.
Usually, there would be a flower or something, but Charlie hasn’t exactly been answering his soulmate’s little messages for a few days now and obviously, that seems weird to them. He almost doesn’t write back, but caves in eventually and draws a broken heart underneath it, followed by the word ‘Sorry’. He waits to see if anything will show up after it, but when there is nothing, he hangs his head. Of course, his soulmate couldn’t really help. He knew that.
However, all is not lost as when his head comes back up for air again, his whole arm is covered in small hearts, better than his own, up and down his entire limb. The sight is enough to start Charlie’s tears again, but for better reasons this time.
It’s almost overwhelming to him how much this…mystery person seems to care. Sure, he has people in the flesh who care. His parents, Tori, Tao, Elle, Issac and all that - but it’s another story knowing someone completely foreign, yet connected to you, cares as well.
He wants to write a thankyou back, express how much the hearts mean to him like how the other responded to his efforts to cheer him up and eventually, he pens down an ‘XO’ on the palm of his left hand (as he’s figured this one’s a leftie) and waits before ink suddenly floods onto his hand like a raging river and ‘you’re welcome’ is underneath the symbols, floating in a different colour that has Charlie’s heart racing.
He hopes he can meet this person one day to really thank them in person, but for now, this is good enough and his heart is a lot lighter than it was five minutes ago, so screw it. The school can get over it. He can get over it.
He honestly can’t blame himself for thinking Ben might be the one.
He really did hope that maybe the other, who had swept in and picked up the remaining pieces left of his shattered life could possibly be the person leaving the drawings on the visible points of his skin, but he soon found he was living a lie and liking it.
Ben was at least…there, a person, not some phantom pen writing words and drawing pictures on his skin that may or may not exist. Sure, it wasn’t the most healthy relationship he’d had with someone, as Ben was a lot, but it was real. He felt it was real at least.
He’s disappointed when he doesn’t see Ben in the library the morning after the Christmas holidays, but he’s not exactly wanting to go to his new Form due to nerves and a smattering of fear from all the bullying he’d escaped a little from the last few months of last term. He’s sure his soulmate’s most likely wondering what in the hell ‘B25!’ is doing on the inside of his hand, but he needed to put it somewhere to remember so he didn’t look like an absolute dunce trying to find the building.
It’s only when he gets there that he realsies he’s in too deep as Nicholas Nelson enters from stage left in a burst of sun drenched circumstance that he knows his gay life is ruined as fucking hell, that guy’s cute. Ben would hate him saying that. His soulmate would as well.
He just resolved to make it through this year alive.
(And if in the hallways a couple of days later, a smiley face eerily similar to the one he used to get as a kid was drawn on his hand by Nick Nelson, he elected to ignore it. At least someone else got a smile out of him unintentionally today.)
However, after starting to hang out with rugby king Nick Nelson, the drawings changed up a little. It almost startles Charlie, but he takes it in stride as complaining was never his thing.
He still gets flowers and the occasional smiley face, but now there’s drumsticks and rugby balls and good god, is that the sign that’s hanging over his bed? His soulmate must either have the same or know someone who does. They are quite popular, neons, at the moment.
T here’s also Switch controllers, snowflakes, stick figure dogs and people, even a heart around or near them that makes his heart hurt, but swell at the same time. His soulmate must have a crush on someone. Of course they would. If only they knew.
Maybe Tao is right about soulmates not being so…loyal.
Still, he’s okay with it. They may be his soulmate, but given that he’d tried to form something akin to this with Ben those past few weeks ago for several months, he’s not really going to blame them for doing the same or thinking of doing the same.
His soulmate seems to also have taken to another language as before he knew it, there’s a ton of French words painted on his skin day after day. Then again, it could also be revenge for Charlie writing a ton of Latin on his arm for like a month for an exam, which does cheer him up a little, but it also is unnerving as Nick knows French.
Nick’s his best friend right now. Could he really be his soulmate?
He still doesn’t know the answer to that question the day after Harry’s birthday party. He’s still so broken, so very broken after he kissed Nick and the latter took off running for the hills the moment he could.
There were broken hearts littering his arm too when he rose, none drawn by him which in hindsight, made him feel worse as it seemed his soulmate (could it be Nick?) was hurting as much as he was in their own situation somehow and he’d neglected to notice.
It was a moment of fancy he regretted and Nick hadn’t texted him all night and all Sunday morning, so he could safely assume their friendship was over. What he didn’t expect was to see him at the door, in the rain, nor to take him upstairs so they could talk only to be kissed again or apologised to in such a way that he didn’t care that his soulmate existed for one single moment.
Nick was wanting to work this out and while he acknowledged that they most likely had soulmates elsewhere, he still wanted Charlie and Charlie didn’t check his arms when he had his hoodie off as he was wearing a long sleeved shirt, but didn’t mind. Nick needed him.
They agreed to keep things on the low for a while until they could do something and the kiss in the rain in the face of the now smeared hearts felt awful, but it also felt lighter than air.
Hopefully, his soulmate, wherever they were, whoever they were, would understand.
It’s an embarrassingly long time before Charlie guesses that he’s right and quite frankly, it takes a swift punch to the nose for him to see sense, if that’s even a thing. It’s in a lot of pain on the field at first impact, but once he’s back in medical holding a tissue as it bleeds and bleeds and bleeds, Mrs Singh draws a long black line down it to check it’s straight before she returns to the field to find the other boys and dismiss them.
He’s there for almost 10 minutes before Nick suddenly shows up and…has the same black nose stripe running down his wet and muddy face. It’s not completely visible under all the gunk, but Charlie’s stopped breathing all the same. Nick also, has seemed to have his whole world stop as he just stares at him like he’s doing to the other, both completely bamboozled by what they are seeing.
Eventually, Charlie is the first to move, the bloody tissue falling to his lap as Nick surges forward to touch him, but instead feebly sits next to him, both of them silent and unknowing just what to say. Issac eventually follows with first aid wipes and Nick does another runner on him again, but this time, Charlie doesn’t feel his heart break or cry.
He just silently deals with the horrible pain spreading through him and gets rid of the line quickly as best he can with the alcohol laced wipes, sitting in the back of the travel bus till they leave and he’s gone as soon as they get back without a word to anyone.
Doesn’t mean he doesn’t cry when he gets back home though.
He invites Nick to his birthday bowling thing out of nowhere. He knows that he shouldn’t as he’s been practically snuffed as his soulmate, but it’s Nick. They haven’t talked about what happened and it seems like they still won’t, so what’s the point of not acting like normal?
It’s only when they are alone in the arcade that Nick finally says “I never got to say thankyou, for all those hearts you gave me when I was 10. My Dad and Mum were divorcing and it was really hard on me, but they really helped a lot.”
Charlie stutters for a moment, but then it eases. “Your hearts helped as well, earlier last year, when I had to…come out. I was having a really bad set of days and you drew all over my arm because you could. I think you broke your arm when I was like 9 or something.”
“Oh, yeah…” Nick chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck. “Under 10 ‘s rugby game, my whole team signed my cast and some friends as well. Bet that was annoying.”
“Not as annoying as you writing French on it for ages.”
“Oi, you wrote Latin on mine, so it was only fair. If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have cared so much. People thought I was turning into a librarian. My mates threw books at me.”
They both had a good laugh after that, but eventually, Nick leaned forward, his head on the glass of the machine that he’d been trying to win on for almost half an hour.
“I wish I had met you, known it was you when I was younger. With what I know now.”
Charlie’s falling again and this time, he’s not going to stop himself. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Nick’s smiling at him again and while no one would really care if they saw two young buoys snogging in the arcade, he still looks around before kissing him lightly. “Me too.”
Nick’s surprise makes him giggle, before his chin is pulled towards him and the whole world fades around them the noise is just a constant buzz and hum as they exist there in that space like they could exist like this every day of their lives. Maybe they could, just maybe live as if that’s all that is needed. That drawings are enough for a basis for something real. It seems to be working now, so it’s not too far of a stretch.
Charlie pulls away after a while, breathless and smiling while Nick is painted with the same hesitancy, but also the same expression before they move to not look suspicious, looking back at the other after a moment and bursting into laughter that brightens everything.
It was going to take some working out to do, but right now seems to be a really good starting point to possibly forever. (And if Nick keeps drawing hearts of him like the ones he’d left the bowling alley with that night, he’ll reaffirm that for as long as he can, period.)