Chapter Text
It wasn’t unheard of for a person to have two soulmates. It wasn’t unheard of for a person to have no soulmates. That’s just how things worked. However, it was a rare sight for someone to lose their soulmate.
When he was seventeen years old, Kent Parson learned what it felt like to lose a part of yourself. The cherry red bruise that covered his chest (evidence of the first time Kent had slammed into Jack when they met, ten years old and fumbling with their protective gear on the ice) had faded away to the pale skin that hid underneath, and Kent couldn’t seem to stop crying. He locked himself in his bathroom and sobbed and shook, rocking back and forth, hugging his knees to his chest in a desperate attempt to convince himself if he looked down, the red stain of Jack’s bond would still be there.
(No matter how much he hoped, it wouldn’t come back)
It was hours before he left the bathroom, showered and skin rubbed so raw that in he looked at himself in the light just right he could still see the outline of where his soulmark had sat, not twenty four hours ago. His mother had walked into his hotel room while he was still looking for a shirt, dress pants sagging around his waist and hair in a frenzy and had just stood there, hand to her mouth, while her son grieved inwardly.
“Oh, honey,” Catherine started, reaching out a hand.
“Don’t mom,” Kent’s voice broke. “Not right now. In an hour I have to be sitting out there, listening to all these fu- people talk and act like they wanted me to go first and not Jack because everyone was always expecting Jack and here I come, little nobody kid from upstate New York, going first in the draft, and I have to get on that stage and smile and act like this is the greatest day of my life and I just can’t-” his voice caught. “I can’t do that if you say anything about it. Please, just. Not right now.”
Catherine nodded and a watery smile spread over her face. Kent was finishing buttoning his shirt and had moved on to tying the solid black tie that he had left hanging on the lampshade next to the bed.
“You look dashing, honey.”
Kent tried for his signature combination of a smirk and a smile, cocky enough to irritate but charming enough to always manage to get people’s attention (and Jack flustered, but Kent was trying to ignore that part), but fell just a touch flat. “Thanks mom. At least they’ll give me a cap to shove over this stupid cowlick.”
He ran his hand over his hair anxiously before smoothing down his fussy cowlick for what felt like the hundredth time that day.
Catherine tried for a laugh, but like Kent’s smile, it too fell short.
“Are you going to immediately flip it backwards after the celebratory photos?”
This time Kent really did smile. “You betcha.”
Catherine walked over to her son and folded him into a hug. Despite being several inches shorter than Kent, she was a fierce hugger and Kent gave himself the moment to bury his head in his mom’s hair and breathe in her familiar scent.
“You’ve gotten so far Kenny, I’m so proud of you.” She said, squeezing Kent tighter. “No matter what you think or whatever they may say, you deserve to go first and hold that jersey. You deserve it. And I know,” she took a deep breath, “I know that Jack would be happy for you that you were the one to get it.”
Kent bit his lip so hard he could taste blood, squeezed his eyes shut, and silently willed the tears to not come spilling out like they had been all day. The last thing he needed was for people to talk, saying he had come to the draft with red eyes and insinuate that he wasn’t completely sober for the event (the last thing he needed was them to drag him down with all of the absolute bullshit they were spewing about Jack). So he counted to five in his head and exhaled as slowly as he could.
“Thanks mom.” His voice was thick with tears, and his shoulders shook despite the almost painful grip Catherine had on them.
“Anytime, honey.” Catherine gave him one last squeeze for good measure before pulling back to take a look at him. “Ready to go?”
Kent took a deep breath, pushed all thoughts of soulmarks and soulmates and Jack Laurent Zimmermann to the back of his mind, and squared his shoulders.
“No, but here we are anyway.”
“That’s my boy.”
A world away, a broken boy lay in a hospital bed with tubes and machines galore, and rubbed at the space on his chest that had been bottle green ( The same colour as your eyes, Kenny ) before he had taken that last handful of pills. He watched the boy with the green eyes walk across the stage on TV and pull on a black jersey, smile for the cameras, and cheekily flip the snapback he had been given backwards so that the huge white ace was obscured and instead a small, blonde cowlick peeked out instead. A world away, a broken boy lay in a hospital bed and cried about all he had lost.
In the space in between, Kent won a cup, and the first thing he thinks is Jack deserves to be the one holding this cup, not me.
He won an Art Ross, and a Calder. He smiled and got his picture taken and filled up the Aces’ record book, one line after another. He made friends, bought a cat, furnished an apartment.
In the space in between, Kent tried to remember how to live without Jack perpetually beside him.
“Hey, Parser,” Alex Tansi called over to Kent as practice was winding down and everyone was heading towards the showers. “You got a soulmate?”
Kent froze up for the tiniest second, long enough to be noticed by anyone paying attention, but short enough that he could brush off if Taner brought it up. “Nah, not about that shit bro, how could I deprive the ladies of a body like this?”
Taner rolled his eyes. “Grow up Parse.”
Kent forced out a laugh. “I’m good, thanks.”
The conversation was steered to someone else on the team; Taner had recently found his soulmate, a sweet girl named Alexa, who had left a bright pink smudge up the length of his left arm. Kent was happy for him (or at least he was trying to convince himself that he was), but all of Taner’s excitement had brought back lingering memories of when he had first gotten his mark (and all the painful memories of the days immediately after it had faded, how he woke up every morning and rushed to the bathroom hoping it had come back, wanting, wishing, praying that it was all just a dream and he would have that bright red stain back against his skin and everything would be alright between him and Jack).
He was ten and crying because he thought he was dying, ugly sobbing in the locker room once all the other kids had left, waiting for his mom to pick him up from practice. The color had been so vivid, so bright, and it had taken up his entire torso, Kent had been sure that he was bleeding under his skin and was going to die any minute.
Jack had walked over to him, already dressed with hair plastered against his scalp from a shower. He was still soft around the edges, chubby cheeks and and awkward haircut, eyes that were just a little bit too big for his face, and an awkward way to how he held himself off the ice. Bad Bob Zimmermann’s son, desperately trying to live up to the fame his dad’s name had created for him.
“Are you okay?” Jack’s voice was high, a little squeaky, and very, very cautious.
“ ’M fine,” Kent said, rubbing his sleeve against his face.
“No you’re not. What’s wrong?” Even at ten, Jack was still taller than Kent, so it helped a bit when he sat down across from kent on the bench in the locker room, straddling the wood so he could look right at Kent, but not quite touching.
Kent looked up at him with watery eyes. “ ’M gonna die,” he said through his sleeve.
“No you’re not.”
“Yes I am!” Kent whipped his arm away from his face and tugged the neckline of his shirt down. “Look I’m bleeding!”
Jack studied his torso curiously, turning his head this way and that for a few moments before the smallest of smiles crept on his face. “You’re not going to die; that’s a soulmark.”
Kent’s crying had left him with hiccups, small and far between, but hiccups nevertheless. His hiccups jumped through his small frame as he carefully pulled his shirt back up.
“Those aren’t real, you only see those on TV.”
“They’re real, my maman and père both have them. They glow just like that, and they’re bright like that, that’s how I know it’s a soulmark.” Jack was full on smiling now. “Did you just get it?”
Kent nodded.
“Oh, good. I think you might be my soulmate.”
Kent’s mouth had slipped open as Jack reached to pull off his own shirt, showing off a bottle green stain that was the exact same size and shape as Kent’s own mark.
“The same colour as your eyes, Kenny.”
There were small crinkles around Jack’s eyes when he smiled, and Kent was pretty sure he had never seen Jack with such unbridled joy so clearly on his face before. Jack smiled like Kent had hung the moon, like this was the greatest gift he had ever been given, greater than hockey ever, Jack smiled like Kent was someone worth wanting. It hurt Kent just to look at that.
“Jack, are you almost done?” Bob’s voice rang out through the locker room. Jack’s smile dimmed somewhat (Kent would have given anything to make it come back).
“Over here Papa!”
Bob walked over to the two boys, concern settling over his features as he realized Kent had only very recently stopped crying.
“Everything alright between you two?” He remembered that Jack had slammed into this boy during the game (Jack had been trying to keep from knocking right into the boards and had knocked into Kent instead).
Jack looked at Kent for a moment, then took a deep breath and turned to his dad, showing his newly coloured torso. “Yeah. Kenny’s my soulmate, papa.”
“Yo, Parser, you coming or what?” Saul, the Aces’ starting goalie, called out to Kent as Saul and a couple of the guys on the team left the locker room.
Kent’s head snapped up. “Sorry, what?”
“You coming to Taner’s for the party, or what?”
“Oh, yeah, I’ll be there.” Kent finished pulling on his shoes and grabbed his bag. “Gonna go home and change first though. I’ll meet you guys there?”
Saul gave him a thumbs up and left.
The building was quiet and the parking lot almost empty by the time Kent made it out to his car (a small miracle). He gave himself a minute, once he was all settled in, to stare at his phone, and will himself not to text Jack with a “Hey remember when-” like he had willed himself almost every practice since he had started with the Aces. It wasn’t even very hard to do anymore, but it was always a present thought at the back of his mind ( Jack would’ve found this funny or Jack would have skated better than that or Jack would’ve loved this ), and today it was just a little harder than it had been yesterday.
Kent typed out a text to no one in particular:
Remember when you kissed me after we won our first game
He deleted it, dropped his phone into the cup holder, and drove an invisible race home.
On the other side of the country, a boy who was a little less broken went to school, made friends, and played a little bit less like his life depended on it. He never typed out texts to no one in particular filled with remember when’s.
In the space in between, Kent won another cup, smiled for a whole lot more pictures, and picked up a few more trophies and records on the way.
Living was easier; forgetting was the hard part.
Kent didn't do hookups.
Or rather. He did, but with a few specific terms.
He never touched more than absolutely necessary (though he’d be damned if his next soulmark stained his lips or his dick first), but he did do a small test right before he decided he wanted to get someone in his bed by dragging his fingertips across their open palm to see if any colours stained (he kept telling himself it was relief that he felt when the skin stayed the same colour it had been before, not disappointment). He never did feelings, nothing even remotely close to a relationship even touched his life, but he did tend to hook up with the same people, if only to keep the possibility of marking someone he decided to have a one night stand with was less. And finally, no blue eyes and never hockey players.
It never got any easier, trying to not imagine that it was Jack he was fucking, it never got any easier trying to tell himself that these hookups didn’t matter, it never got any easier waking up and not seeing the bright red stain on his chest, but he still got on anyway.
It was harder when his hookups had soulmarks themselves: greens, oranges, purples; sometimes in the most innocent of places, sometimes not. Everything that Kent so desperately wanted but ran away from at the same time, played out on other people’s bodies. He never asked why they were hooking up with him when they obviously had a soulmate out there somewhere, and they never volunteered the information. Kent told himself he liked it better that way, but the disappointment still hung in the air the mornings when he woke up and the lack of light in the room make his eyes think that the person sleeping beside him in his bed had black hair and sharper cheekbones than he remembered, before he looked down and saw a bare chest and reality crashed over him.
Two thousand miles away, a boy who was a lot less broken met his own personal sunshine, and he thought Maybe this time, I won’t fuck it up.
He has morning checking clinics and the first time he goes to press his shoulder up against this brilliant boy, he finds his arm stained with yellow after, bright and golden, just under his sleeve.
(Later on, Eric Bittle finds a mark, bright blue and distinctly glowing across his upper right arm; his smile could light fires).
It seemed like a good idea, at the time. The Aces were in Boston for a game against the Bruins, they had won, and everyone was a little giddy with the thrill of rounding out a roadie with a victory. They had elected to stay the night in Boston (in no small part due to the amount of shots the entire second and third line had downed in the hour right after the game had ended, that had pretty much guaranteed a morning flight back to Vegas) and Kent had decided renting a car to drive out to #Epikegster2k14 wasn’t the worst idea in the world.
Oh how wrong he was.
He had walked in and saw Jack smiling, saw a small blonde boy with huge brown eyes looking up at Jack like he had hung the moon, saw every little bit of hope he had coming here crumble right in front of him.
Kent slipped on the comfortable mask he had perfected after years in the NHL, after all the questions and stares and whispered comments that maybe he wasn’t as good as Jack Zimmermann, and smiled the easy smirk that used to leave Jack stuttering and flushed bright red (a similar tinge to the stain on Kent’s skin).
“I wouldn’t believe it if I weren’t seeing it myself.” Kent always did know how to kick himself when he was down; he was the best at it. “Jack Zimmermann. At a party. Taking a selfie. ”
Though it didn’t quite result in a flushing, stuttering Jack, it did succeed in getting Jack’s attention away from the small blonde boy under his arm, and onto Kent.
“Kent.” Jack stare was wide eyed, and Kent remembered all the times he had seen Jack with that exact same expression on his face (always at hockey, or something to do with his dad, or his pills, or his psychiatrist, never Kenny, never him).
“Hey Zimms,” Kent affected an exaggerated slouch. “Didja miss me?”
It didn’t end the way he wanted.
There was shoving and shouting and the words that Kent knew would hurt the most shot at Jack with all the intention to make him bleed. A kiss he had been craving for years pressed against his lips and he had thrown it away like an idiot because he had seen a bright yellow stain against Jack’s skin and lost it.
He had seen yellow and he hadn’t seen green and that just ripped a whole new hole in him that Kent hadn’t previously thought possible.
So he did the only thing he knew how to do; he lashed out. He wanted to make Jack hurt as much as he had been hurting right then, like he was seventeen again, crying in the hotel bathroom right before the draft, realizing that Jack was never going to love him the same way ever again. He went for blood and found it.
(It wasn’t until later, after he had pretended to make nice with Jack’s friends, play it cool and play beer pong with them, taken photos, act like nothing was wrong and then drive back to Boston in the middle of the night, when he was in his hotel room alone, sitting in the tub and letting the water rise around him, that he let himself fall apart. It wasn’t until he was alone, and he could have sworn he was seventeen again, in a hotel in an unfamiliar city, the weight of the world sitting on his shoulders, and a gaping hole in his chest that nothing in the world could fill, that he let himself cry and shake and regret everything about that night.)
Except he didn’t, not really, because if only for a moment, he was pressed against Jack, and Jack was pressed against him, and they were kissing, and it was almost like before .
Except it wasn’t.
Miles away, Jack Zimmermann cried about everything he lost, and hoped for everything he dared to dream about.
Miles away, Jack kissed a boy with a smile like the sun and marveled at the sight of the bright blue stain he had left on Bitty’s arm, lined his own yellow marked arm up against Bitty’s and let his heart feel full at the love that was growing between them.
He went to bed with dreams of brown eyes and soft kisses, completely forgetting the boy with the brittle smile and bottle green eyes that had marched back into his life; there wasn’t space for him there anymore.