Chapter Text
But if you should be disappointed, bear it like a man; and have recourse, neither to the dagger, nor to the poisoned bowl, nor to the rope.
- Alexander Hamilton to John Laurens, 16 September 1780
John Laurens had had a hard life. He wasn’t going to deny that. His childhood home was suffocating. His fathers strict rules wrapped a tight rope around him and when he couldn’t help but try to escape, the rope was pulled tighter.
He felt bad for his soulmate. His father hit him, a lot. Even if he tried to beg him not to, arguing that it wasn’t ethical when he had a soulmate out there who would be feeling it too, he didn’t care. Whoever the person was would just have to suffer through it with him.
And then, in his teenage years, he had started hurting himself. It was a vicious cycle. He couldn’t resist the urge, but the guilt that he was hurting another person as well made the self-hatred even worse. At least his soulmate wouldn’t be left with the scars that now littered John’s arms.
Yeah, John hasn’t had an easy life.
His soulmate has probably had a worse one, though.
When John was thirteen years old, he had the worst case of soulmate-sickness that he’s ever experienced. Before then, when it had happened, his father had just brushed it off. The sickness couldn’t cause permanent damage to him, so there was no reason to stay off of school. No reason to set aside his studies for such a stupid, useless thing.
It’s safe to say that Henry Laurens did not know what it feels like to have a soulmate.
The sickness got worse and worse. One day, John woke up, and it felt like his entire body was weighed down by a pain so severe that he could hardly get out of bed.
“Stop being such a wimp, Jack!” His father had scolded, walking over to his bed and ripping off his covers. “Get up. You have an exam today.”
John had to focus every single ounce of effort he had into standing up. His legs were shaking, and he felt incredibly hot. He didn’t sweat, though, because it wasn’t his sickness. But he couldn’t give in. Because if he did, his father would hit him again, and then his soulmate would have to go through even more pain than they already were.
On the bus to school that morning, resting his head against the window, barely managing to stay conscious, John had wondered distantly if his soulmate was going to die. It certainly felt like it. John felt like a zombie, himself. They hadn’t died yet, of course, the pain would lift immediately, but it was feeling likely.
He would regret it for the rest of his life, but for a short few hours, his sickness-riddled thirteen-year-old mind had hoped that his soulmate would die. That way John would be able to move on, pain free.
Yeah, he wasn’t proud of that. But it’s hard to describe experiencing what it feels like to slowly die of yellow fever while still being forced to go to a fancy boy’s school and dedicate all of his focus to his studies.
Plus, much to his father’s dismay, yellow fever isn’t the kind of sickness you get in the United States. It was unlikely he would ever meet his soulmate, if they lived so far away.
As John’s teacher passed out the exam papers that day, he could barely keep himself focused on what the subject matter was supposed to be.
“Dude, are you okay?” someone asked from beside him.
“Mhmm,” he gritted out.
The teacher passed him his exam and he picked up a pencil, his hand shaking. He looked at the first question. The words started to blur.
And then everything went black.
John woke up seven hours later in the hospital. He had no idea where he was. The last thing that he remembered was trying to remember the name of the first Treasury Secretary through his feverish haze.
A nurse with kind eyes came to see him. “Ah, you’re awake,” she said.
“What happened?”
“You fainted in class. Soulmate sickness.”
“Crap,” John muttered. His dad was going to kill him.
“How’re you feeling, sweetheart?” She asked. “Have you had a proper diagnosis? Do you know what it is your soulmate has?”
“Yellow fever,” he said. “Second phase.”
She winced a bit. It didn’t do much to comfort him. “What on earth were you doing at school, then?”
He shrugged. “It’s just soulmate sickness. It’s not going to actually hurt me.”
“Except it creates a lot of strain on your brain, sweetheart. Enough that you passed out today. If you had been standing up, and you fell, it could have caused a lot more harm.”
He looked down at his feet, poking out through the thin sheet. “My dad doesn’t care.”
She gave him a sympathetic look.
John’s father had been angry when he had to pick him up from the hospital, as if it had been John’s decision to call the ambulance, while he was unconscious.
“You should not be so weak, Jack. This sickness is nothing more than a mental illusion, and you know that,” he spat.
Of course he knew that. But when the mental illusion triggers pain nerves, it’s kind of hard to ignore. Still, he kept quiet. It was hard to summon words over the intense pain he was feeling, anyway.
The sickness had passed a couple of weeks later, and John’s soulmate had not died. He knew this because this is when he started the pinching.
One morning, when the sickness was starting to subside, he felt a different kind of pain from his soulmate. An intense drop in his stomach, and a burning feeling that rushed to his heart. He didn’t know what had happened, but he decided to pinch his arm to get his soulmate’s attention. Maybe they would pinch back, to confirm that they weren’t dying of a heart attack or something.
And they did. Only a few seconds after John had lightly pinched his left wrist, he felt a light pinch on his right.
Huh.
——
The night that Alexander’s mother died, he didn’t know what had happened. He knew that he was getting better, and that she wasn’t. He wasn’t an idiot. But when he had fallen asleep in the warm embrace of his mom, he hadn’t expected to wake up surrounded by the cooling flesh of a dead body.
He sat upright with a jolt. His vision was blurring. A cool breeze blew in from the open window above them, but it didn’t do anything to calm him. Nothing could do that. His mama, lying with her eyes closed, never to be opened again. He would never see the warm brown of her eyes again.
Alexander felt like he was going to be sick, and not from the illness. In fact, he didn’t even feel sick anymore. His fever had broken, and his throat didn’t feel tight anymore.
Why? Why me?
He was genuinely considering throwing himself out of the open window when he felt a small pinch on his left wrist. He looked down at it. His soulmate. He had almost forgotten he had one, these past few weeks, his mind too clouded by the fever.
Hesitating, he pinched back.
It was the reminder that someone was out there, feeling his pain too, that kept him from jumping that morning. And the morning after. And all of the mornings after that.
Without his mom, and eventually, without James, Alexander learned to find his own way in the world. Funnily enough, he found that the only person he ever really let himself connect with was his soulmate. Sometimes, when the day was going really hard for him, when no-one would listen or someone coughed on the street and he panicked, he would pinch his wrist. And every time, without fail, his soulmate pinched back. It made him smile.
Sometimes, he wondered if he would ever meet them. It’s a very rare occurrence to meet your soulmate, he knew that of course. For most of history, people with soulmates have been seen as no more than a nuisance. People with pain that affected them greatly but could never really hurt them. It was a thing of fairytales to actually meet the person. They were randomly assigned, as far as anyone could tell, meaning that they could be on literal other sides of the world. They could be from any background, any class. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
It was becoming more common nowadays, thanks to the use of online forums, but even then, it was still very rare.
Alexander wasn’t sure whether or not he even wanted to meet them. They’d shared so many experiences, so much pain, that he was almost worried that they wouldn’t live up to his expectations. He was even more worried that he wouldn’t live up to theirs.
The topic was too existential. It made him worry too much. And he already had enough worry in his mind. So Alexander pushed all thoughts of soulmates out of his brain and instead focused on his studies. But still, he never stopped pinching his wrist.
It was a cold night, just a few days after Alexander’s fifteenth birthday, when he felt a cut for the first time. He looked alarmingly down at his wrist. It was bare. This was his soulmate’s pain.
The cut didn’t feel too deep. Maybe they had scratched their wrist on a rock or something.
Then came another.
Oh, god.
Alexander had known his entire life that his soulmate was being abused. Whether by a parent or a family member or a friend, he couldn’t know. What he did know is that sometimes he would feel himself being slapped across the face. A few times he was punched in the stomach.
But he’d never felt his soulmate being cut before. Realistically, there was nothing he could do. For all he knew, they were on the other side of the world. Nevertheless, he’d developed a sort of attachment to the person who pinched him back, and he wanted to do something.
He knew he couldn’t stop whoever was hurting them, but he could at least offer support.
He pinched his wrist.
——
John’s hand froze.
He pinched back.
——
A few seconds after Alexander felt his soulmate’s pinch, the cutting stopped.
Oh.
Suddenly he wished he could send something other than pain to them.
——
John didn’t stop hurting himself after his soulmate stopped him the first time. God, he wished that he did. But sometimes, there was nothing he could do to stop the urge.
He had gone crazy. That was the only explanation. The only way to explain why sometimes his head got so loud and so painful that the only way he could stop it was by cutting himself. He took to only wearing long sleeves. It was a bit strange, especially in the South Carolinian summers, but it’s not like his father ever cared enough to notice.
Still, every time, his soulmate gave him a pinch. And even when things were really bad, even when he couldn’t stop himself even with the reminder, it still comforted him slightly.
He wanted more than anything else to meet the person on the other side. The person who he had been connected to since he was a year old. At least, he’s pretty sure that’s when it started. His father never bothered to keep track of it. It was John’s mother who explained the whole soulmate thing to him. She wasn’t there to comfort him anymore. So all he had left was the random stranger from some far away place with whom he shared a connection.
He scolded himself for wanting to find them. They would probably hate him. They were stuck with a crazy soulmate that hurt them. Why would they want to meet him?
Despite this, over time, he became hyper-fixated on finding them. When he wasn’t studying or drawing or hurting himself, he was on the online soulmate forums, looking desperately for anyone who might match stories with him. One good thing about being crazy: he had a distinct pattern of pain. He was angry at himself for doing it every time, but he was focused, now. Plus, it wasn’t like his efforts were proving successful. It was extremely unlikely he would ever find them. So what was the harm in trying?
There were a lot of tips out there for finding your soulmate, like finding out where in the world their illnesses are most common. That actually narrowed things down a bit for him, as there weren’t too many countries where yellow fever was a concern. There were even less where treatment was so scarce that it progressed to the second stage.
The next thing he did to narrow it down was calculating his soulmate’s sleeping pattern. It was weird and a bit stalkerish, but John was invested, and he told himself that there were worse ways to spend his time. To do it, he waited for his soulmate to get sick. After a couple months of waiting, they got a bit of a cold, with a consistent sore throat. Then, he timed the periods in which the pain went away. You can’t feel pain while you’re asleep, and so, by extension, your soulmate can’t feel your pain either.
Assuming that they had a reasonable sleep schedule, John was able to guess that his soulmate was living in a time zone pretty similar to his own.
Combine that with the list of countries where yellow fever is common, and…
His soulmate was either from central America or the Caribbean.
John was quite proud of this discovery. He had dedicated a lot of time to meticulous research and it had paid off. Plus, if they didn’t live in the US, there was no chance of him meeting them, right? It would do no harm.
He explained all his discoveries excitedly to Francis, his friend at school.
“-Which means I now know which region they live in,” he finished.
Francis gave him an exasperated look. “Dude, you are way too obsessed with this.”
John rolled his eyes. “I think it’s reasonable to want to know who the guy who almost killed me from yellow fever in middle school is.”
“He didn’t almost kill you, you literally just said that’s not how it works.”
“Okay, but it felt like I was dying.”
“I still stand by the fact that you’re being a stalker,” Francis said.
“I’m not stalking them!”
Francis gave him a look.
“Okay, well, even if I am, the world kind of forced us into stalking each other, so…”
He never did quite convince Francis that what he was doing with his soulmate was totally normal. But it didn’t matter much to John. He was happy doing his research anyway.
Plus, only a couple of months later, he and Francis found another way to occupy their time spent together.
John hadn’t realized that he liked guys before that. It panicked him at first. His father would be livid if he found out. He would almost definitely be kicked out, not before being beaten to a pulp.
But Francis made it easy to forget about that. John found himself enjoying their time spent together so much that he almost forgot about the soulmate thing altogether. After all, what was the point of searching for his supposed soulmate when he had a person he loved right in front of him? And he wasn’t hurting Francis.
He even stopped hurting himself for a while. Things were looking up.
Until Francis fucking dumped him.
And it all got worse from there. John was alone again. He started cutting himself like a fucking crazy person again. He only ever wore long sleeves. He knew what his father would say if he saw his scars.
Why would you mock our family like that, Jack? Why are you so weak? What did I do wrong?
It didn’t help that John now knew that he was gay, either. It just meant another thing to worry about hiding. Another thing that would mean that his father would never love him.
The only thing that kept him going was his soulmate.
He never stopped pinching.
One night, only a couple of weeks before John’s 18th birthday, before he would finally be able to escape this hellhole for college, he felt his heart racing.
He was mostly annoyed at first. He was just about to fall asleep. He had enough trouble getting to sleep, he didn’t need random heart palpitations keeping him up.
But he quickly realized that it wasn’t his own heart that was beating out of control. It was his soulmate’s. And it kept going like that for hours. It wouldn’t stop.
After four hours, the cold started to seep in. John’s entire body was shivering. You don’t share temperature with your soulmate, unless it causes pain. This temperature was causing pain, alright. It surrounded him, like he was covered in icicles.
Half an hour later, he was gasping for air. It was as if his throat had closed up, and barely any air was able to make it through. When he tried to breathe deeply to get in as much air as possible, it felt like someone was stabbing his throat.
He stayed awake that entire night, shivering in the cold and gasping for breath. It was still going when his father walked in to get him up.
“What on earth is going on, Jack? Why are you trembling like that?”
John tried to answer, but no words came out. Instead, he let out what probably sounded more like a raspy, gasping moan. He saw his sister standing behind their father, staring at him with terrified eyes.
“Say something, boy!”
“Dad, he’s clearly struggling to breathe-”
“-It’s that damned soulmate business again, isn’t it,” Henry Laurens grumbled.
John nodded shakily.
“Well, come downstairs once you’re done with it,” he responded, before walking out of the room and slamming the door behind him.
About twenty minutes later, his breathing started to improve again. It took hours for the cold to go away. Days for his heart to stop racing.
He didn’t sleep for days. His soulmate didn’t either, because the pain never stopped.
For those couple of days after whatever had happened, John pinched his wrist every couple of hours. Every time, he got a response. He was terrified that his soulmate was going to die.
But he didn’t. John kept pinching. And his soulmate kept pinching back.