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It’s 1:30 in the morning and Jack is nearly asleep, his brain finally letting go of the plays he wants to run in the next game and the ways he might reword the thesis statement of the paper he’s writing. He’s vaguely aware of Shitty going into the bathroom and the sound of the shower, but it’s no more than background noise.
That changes when a groan echoes through the bathroom, like there’s a large, wounded animal in there.
Jack sits up, all chances of sleep gone in an instant. He’s never heard Shitty make that sound before. He can hear him moving around in there, and the water shuts off, so he didn’t slip and hit his head or any of the other awful, too-close-to-home scenarios that his brain is dreaming up. “Shits?” he calls out, pitching his voice to be audible in the bathroom but not bother Bittle across the hall.
The door opens and the light from the bathroom spills into Jack’s room. Shitty emerges, patting himself off with a towel. His voice sounds strangled as he says, “It came in.” He gains confidence as he adds, “Check this out, I’m a man now, motherfucker!”
He drops the towel on the floor and waves his arms in the general vicinity of his chest, and then Jack gets it. It’s not easy to see in the low light from the bathroom, but the name ‘Shitty’ is now written in neat black letters right over Shitty’s heart.
“Oh hey, congrats, man,” he says, and he hopes it comes out sounding as sincere as he means it. They’ve never talked about it, but Jack knows Shitty’s been worried that his soulmark would be his wallet name.
“Thanks, Jack,” says Shitty, uncharacteristically serious again, and Jack frowns. Then he realizes what Shitty’s doing.
Most people think of getting your soulmark as the last step of puberty. It usually happens between the ages of 18 and 21 or so, though a few kids get theirs as young as 12, and occasionally you hear about someone who got into middle age without one. Your soulmark shows the name that your soulmate thinks, or will think, of you by.
Once both of you have your marks, your match happens the first time your soulmate says the name on your chest to you. People describe the feeling as being like a stabbing pain, or an electric shock, or a heart attack. It’s over pretty quickly, and most people seem too happy to have their match to be bothered by the pain.
Jack wouldn’t know. He has no idea who his soulmate is, and Shitty has just proved that it’s not him. Not that Jack expected it to be.
“Shitty,” he says, because he’s not an asshole and Shitty deserves the confirmation. “You didn’t actually think it would be me, did you?”
Shitty sits down on Jack’s bed, throwing an arm around his shoulders. “C’mon, you magnificent maple moose, we would’ve been great together. Fuck the Hollywood conception of soulmates, right? Fuck heteronormativity, fuck amatonormativity, you and me platonically forever.”
“Sure, fuck all those things,” Jack agrees, bumping Shitty’s shoulder with his own. “But I’m holding out for a soulmate who knows how to put on pants. Why don’t you go find the person you actually want and find out how heterosexual and amato—euh…” He didn’t think this sentence through. In his defense, it’s almost two in the morning. He rewinds and takes a different stab at it. “…find out what kind of soulmates she wants to be.”
After Shitty leaves, Jack lies in bed staring at the ceiling for a while, but he’s not thinking about hockey plays or history papers anymore.
Shitty’s not wrong. Everyone deserves a soulmate relationship that works for them, even if it doesn’t look like what Hollywood thinks it should.
Ransom and Holster are a great example. They’re the only two guys on the team who have their match, as far as Jack knows, and it’s with each other. They describe their relationship as “Platonic” “Except when it’s not” “Bro.” Jack doesn’t really get it, but they seem happy, and it doesn’t affect their performance on the ice, so it’s none of his business.
(There were about six weeks after Ransom got his mark when they could have matched but didn’t, because despite the physical evidence that they think of each other as ‘Ransom’ and ‘Holster,’ respectively, they almost never call each other by those names. They finally matched near the end of a tense game of beer pong, when Ransom joined in a crowd chanting “Holster! Holster! Holster!” Holster missed his shot, turned around, surveyed the dozen or so people chanting, and asked, “Ransom?” Then they did an elaborate ten-minute high-five sequence that somehow incorporated Ransom taking over at the beer pong table. No one else who was there realized what had just happened, so Jack found out when everyone else did the next morning, complete with a dramatic reenactment of the celly.)
So it’s not that Jack thinks there’s anything wrong with soulmate bonds that don’t fit the Hollywood model. It’s just that when he imagines his own ideal soulmate bond, it looks both heteronormative and amatonormative, and it has since long before Shitty taught him those words.
All he knows for sure about his soulmate is that they’re going to think of him as ‘Jack.’ After his mark came in, he stood in front of the mirror for a long time running his hand over it, wondering if he’d expected it to say ‘Zimms.’
He wouldn’t mind if his soulmate is a man, but he has to acknowledge that things will be easier if it’s a woman. He’s heard plenty of horror stories about what happens to players with male soulmates, if they don’t manage to hide it. Things are better now than they were when his dad was playing, but they’re still not great.
His desire for a traditionally romantic bond is both deeper-rooted and harder to explain. He wants a life where he and his soulmate can talk about hockey and whatever his soulmate’s interests are over dinner, and then they clean up the kitchen together before going to bed together. He wants someone to kiss and have sex with, exclusively. He wants someone he will miss when he’s on the road, and who will miss him too. He wants someone to argue with about home décor.
(When he was a kid, his parents were looking for a new rug for the living room, and each of them had a different favorite. His mom won, but on his dad’s birthday the rug that she had called ‘a hideous eyesore’ showed up in the basement den. She then spent the next few years periodically rearranging the furniture to cover as much of it as possible. Jack found it all thoroughly embarrassing at the time, but now he thinks he gets it.)
But aside from his personal feelings about a soulmate he might never even meet, he has to think about what Shitty getting his mark is going to mean for the team.
The problem is that Shitty was the oldest one of them who didn’t have his mark yet. Jack knows from experience that you can sit through what feels like a million Student Health Center seminars, but if your mark comes in late you will still lie awake wondering if there’s something fundamentally broken about you. If you’re never going to know real love. Jack's mark didn't come in until shortly after they got knocked out of the playoffs his sophomore year, and until it did he'd half convinced himself that his overdose had somehow ruined his chances for a soulmate forever.
That kind of thinking is hard to avoid even when you know it's irrational. So now that Shitty has his mark, it seems inevitable that the younger guys without theirs are going to start feeling more pressure.
Several of them already have theirs, of course. Ollie got his first name about halfway through his first season at Samwell. Chowder says he got his— ‘Chris’—the summer before he came to Samwell. Jack assumes Chowder’s girlfriend still doesn’t have hers; if she did, Jack probably would have heard about it one way or the other. Dex is a little defensive about the fact that his mark says ‘Dex,’ but not enough to bother hiding it.
Wicks, on the other hand, keeps his mark covered. The patches that are good enough to stand up to sweat and locker room showers are expensive and hard to use, so whatever it is must be pretty personal. Like Jack’s overdose, it’s one of those things that the whole team knows is not fair game for chirping.
That leaves Bittle as the oldest guy on the team without a mark. Jack hopes he can be patient about it. If Bittle has a soulmark crisis, Jack suspects it’s going to throw off the whole team. Jack doesn’t feel equipped to deal with that.
Despite the fact that he implicitly told Shitty to go find Lardo, he’s not actually sure if she has her mark, now that he thinks of it. It’s not like Jack has ever seen her without a shirt. Shitty probably has, though, so he’ll know. There was a kegster last year when everyone of all genders danced topless to Madonna, which Ransom and Holster loved and wouldn’t stop talking about for weeks.
Jack breathes deeply, progressively relaxes his muscles, imagines his thoughts drifting away like bubbles, and otherwise uses every strategy he learned in therapy to stop worrying about his teammates’ soulmate situations and go to sleep.
Shitty doesn’t take Jack’s advice to find Lardo, either immediately or at a more reasonable hour of the morning. Instead, they’re walking out of the locker room before practice nearly a week later when Lardo says, “Hey Shitty, I’ve got your—”
Shitty stops dead in his tracks, hand clutched to his heart. “Lardo?”
She fumbles her clipboard. “It’s platonic?” she whispers, eyes wide. Jack can’t tell from her voice which answer she’s hoping for. Shitty spends a long moment just staring at her, speechless.
Jack sighs. Obviously neither of them is going to be any use until they figure this out. “Go on, I’ll tell the coaches something came up.”
Lardo recovers first. “Thanks man, we owe you.” Then she grabs Shitty’s arm and drags him toward the door, and Jack herds the rest of the team onto the ice.
Saturday night finds Jack sitting at his desk doing homework while Shitty and Lardo pass a joint back and forth on the roof outside. When they first got there, Shitty stuck his head in Jack’s window to invite him to join them, but he declined. He has 150 pages to read before Monday, and he’s trying to take notes on ways he could use the reading for his final essay.
Jack starts to worry that they’ve forgotten that he can hear them when they start talking about their match.
“I’ve never shown my mark to anybody before,” says Lardo, her voice soft in the night air.
“Nobody?”
“Not everybody spends as much time naked as you do, dude. I just figure random hookups don’t get to know that info, you know?”
Jack can almost picture Shitty’s face as he processes that.
After a moment Lardo continues, “I was still in high school when it came in. Can you imagine what it would have been like if people saw it? It’s not like people called me ‘Lardo’ back then. They would have thought it was a weight thing. Hell, I kind of thought it was a weight thing. And my mom would have—”
Nope, Jack shouldn’t be listening to this. He closes his book and his laptop, and scrapes the chair across the floor as he gets up. The sudden silence from the roof suggests that he was right, and they’d forgotten he could hear them. He heads for the bathroom, making sure his steps are audible,. Then he rethinks that plan, since he’d have to come back out in just a minute. Instead, he heads for the hallway and closes the door behind him, not slamming it but making sure it’s audible.
Then he realizes he should have at least brought his book with him. Well, there’s no way he’s going back into his room yet. He can hear Bittle in the kitchen, so he heads down there to see what’s going on and if he can help.
It takes him longer than it should to realize that something is up with Bittle.
In his defense, the end of the school year is a whirlwind, between signing with the Falconers, finishing classes, getting ready for graduation, and moving out of the room he’s lived in for three years. And off the ice, he’s never been the best at reading people.
So he doesn’t realize something is wrong until after he and Shitty kiss the ice. Bittle follows them up to the roof, but he’s quiet, keeping to the back of the group. Jack heads for the edge with his camera, so it takes him a minute to notice that Bittle is still standing by the door, arms wrapped around himself, shivering, as the others sit down and start to make themselves comfortable.
It’s barely chilly out, in Jack’s opinion, so that’s a problem he can fix easily. He shrugs his jacket off and heads for Bittle, holding it out.
But Bittle shakes his head and takes a step back. “You know what, guys, I’m tired. I think I’m going to just—I have to—pie!” He shoves the pie he’s already holding into Jack’s hands and vanishes back down the stairwell.
Jack blinks at him, disappointed for reasons he’s not sure he understands.
Ransom asks, “Dude, do you think that was better or worse than the time he told us he left a pie baking in the library?”
“Better, for sure,” opines Holster. “We all knew the library thing wasn’t true. This one probably is true, actually. He usually ‘has to pie.’”
“Nah,” says Ransom. “Pie isn’t even a verb, bro. ‘I have to pie’ doesn’t mean anything. At least the library thing was specific.”
They continue to argue as Jack joins the circle and sets the pie down in the center. Shitty and Lardo are having what appears to be an entire conversation consisting only of eyebrow motions and small head shakes, which Jack has no hope of deciphering. Suddenly he’s very aware that he’s a fifth wheel, the only unmatched person hanging out with two soulmate pairs.
It strikes him that it would be nice to have a hobby. Bittle’s going to get some chirping for “I have to pie,” but Jack would never live it down if he attempted to escape the roof of Faber, after kissing it goodbye, by saying “I have to hockey.”
Bittle still seems off at graduation. More specifically, he seems like he’s avoiding Jack, and Jack has no idea why. Bittle also seems subdued, not quite his normal chipper self, although Jack isn’t sure that would be obvious to someone who doesn’t know him well.
He smiles, and he congratulates them, and he turns away to hide his glistening eyes, and he keeps someone else between himself and Jack the whole time. Jack must have offended him somehow, but he has no idea what he did. He hates it, and he hates even more that he might not have a chance to fix it.
Bittle finally allows himself to be squished between Jack and Shitty for a picture, at least. After they step apart, he throws his arms around Shitty. When he pulls away, he hesitates for a moment before doing the same to Jack.
Jack has never hugged Bittle off the ice before, and he’s been missing out. He suddenly wishes he had Shitty’s easy comfort with physical affection. When they’re not in their hockey gear, Bittle’s body slots neatly against Jack’s own. It’s warm and solid, and Jack doesn’t want to let go.
Bittle pulls away after, and Jack has to force himself to let him go. He holds onto Jack’s tie, staring at it. “I—I guess the next time I’ll see you will be on TV, huh!”
Jack’s heart clenches at that idea. “What? No, I’ll drive up before the season starts.”
“Oh, of course!” Bittle lets go. His smile looks plastered on; Jack doesn’t think he believes him. As he’s turning away, he says, “Well, you get on outta here, then.”
He gets a few steps away before Jack says, “Bittle!” He can’t let it end like this, can’t let Bittle walk away thinking they won’t see each other in person again.
Bittle looks over his shoulder, and Jack sees his eyes start to glaze over in a way that’s all too familiar, although he hasn’t seen it in a few months. He lunges to catch him before he hits the ground.
His dad has been off talking to someone, but he sees the motion and comes over now, looking concerned. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack can see that Ransom and Holster are headed their way too, although the last time he saw them they were chatting with a group of women in graduation gowns. Jack relaxes a little; they’ll know what to do about the handful of strangers that are also moving toward them. He's got three great D-men doing their best to hold off the crowd and give Bittle as much privacy as possible.
Jack starts in on the familiar motions of rousing Bittle. “Bittle. Bittle!”
Bittle’s eyes finally blink open and focus on Jack’s face. “Jack?”
Jack always assumed that getting your match was painful, since people compare it to things like heart attacks and electrocution. Those comparisons were misleading. If he had to describe the sensation, he would say that it’s as if someone turned his heart into a giant guitar string and plucked it. It’s overwhelming and disorienting, but it’s not painful.
Bittle is his soulmate. That’s good. That’s wonderful!
But Bittle has clapped his hand over his mouth, and he looks panicked as he gets up. “Sorry. Sorry!” He’s running away now.
“Bittle?” Jack’s heart is still throbbing faintly and his soulmate is running away from him, and he doesn’t understand why.
His dad dismisses a couple of bystanders with a friendly smile and comes back to Jack. He puts a hand on Jack’s shoulder, his face melting into genuine concern. “Your mother won’t be done for a while yet,” he says quietly in French. “You should do what you need to do.”
Jack nods and takes off running. As he runs, he thinks again about his domestic fantasies of life with a soulmate. Bittle slots into them more perfectly than he could possibly have hoped, just with more pie than he imagined before. He’s worth any amount of prejudice Jack might have to deal with in the League. He just has to find out why Bittle is upset now, and fix it.
When he gets to the second floor of the Haus, Jack can hear Bittle breathing heavily in what used to be his room, now dotted with boxes of Sharks gear. He turns around as Jack approaches and puts his head in his hands. “Lord, Jack, I’m so sorry,” he says, muffled.
“Sorry? Why?”
“I—I know you don’t want—”
“Hey.” Jack crosses the room to where Bittle is standing and takes his wrists, gently pulling them away from his face. “I do want this. I wasn’t expecting it but I should have been, I think. I don’t know what you want exactly, but we should talk about it. I want to make it work.”
Bittle takes a deep breath and plasters the most obviously fake smile Jack has ever seen on his face. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry, I’m being silly. I know platonic soulmates are just as good, I just—”
“Bittle. Bitty.” Jack considers trying to explain his own feelings, but decides that actions speak louder than words. He lets go of Bittle’s right wrist and brings his hand up to cup his cheek before Bittle can get his own hand back over his eyes. Jack slides his other hand up Bittle’s arm to his shoulder as he leans down and puts gentle pressure on Bittle’s cheek until he’s in position for their lips to meet.
Objectively, it’s not a great kiss. Bittle’s too surprised, and Jack didn’t manage to get the angle quite right. He pulls away to readjust, and then Bittle gets with the program, putting his arms around Jack’s back and pulling him in.
This kiss is better. Bittle’s body fits against Jack’s even better than he realized back on the quad. If hugging Bittle was a revelation, Jack thinks kissing him might be a complete religious experience.
Eventually he has to face the fact that they have a limited amount of time here and they should probably talk about this. Jack gathers his willpower and pulls away.
Bittle is looking up at him with those huge dark eyes. Jack thinks he could lose himself in those eyes. “My mark says ‘Bittle.’”
“Yeah. Sorry, I guess that’s weird.” Soulmarks almost never change, even when the person’s soulmate changes how they think of them. Bittle is probably stuck with his last name on his chest for the rest of his life.
Bittle shakes his head. “No. I mean, maybe a little, but—Lord, this is embarrassing.” He lets go of Jack’s biceps and takes a step away, turning to the side. Jack resists the urge to follow him. “I guess I freaked out a little when it came in? Because you’re pretty much the only person who calls me that, except, like, the coaches.” He wrinkles his nose. “And I had such a big crush on you.”
Now Jack can’t help but step toward him and pull him into another kiss. He can’t believe he wasted so much time not doing this.
This time it's Bittle who pulls away. He leans into Jack’s side as he continues. “I thought you were straight? And, like I said, there’s nothing wrong with platonic soulmates but it’s not what I wanted. I guess I was just thinking that if it was you, I didn’t want to know. Can you imagine having a giant not-so-platonic crush on your platonic soulmate?”
“I don’t think it usually works that way.”
“I mean, it could! I just thought it would be easier if I let you go without ever finding out for sure. And then maybe it would turn out to be a guy from another team or something.”
Jack shakes his head reflexively at that and squeezes Bittle toward him. “I’m glad it’s me.”
Bittle smiles up at him. “I am too. I just never believed I’d get to have this.” He tilts his head up for another kiss, and Jack bends down eagerly.
Jack is still lost in the softness of Bittle’s lips, the sweetness of him, when his phone buzzes. He’d be willing to ignore it for a few more minutes, but Bittle, as keenly attuned to phones as always, pulls back as it buzzes a second time. “Do you need to get that?”
“Euh, my mom is probably done with her alumni event. I should—” He doesn’t want to finish that sentence.
Bittle checks his own phone and wrinkles his nose. “I have a shuttle to catch,” he admits.
“I’ll text you,” Jack promises. Reluctantly, he pulls out his phone. As he expected, his dad has been texting to check in on him and to remind him that they need to leave for dinner. Jack feels a moment of gratitude for his dad, who he’s not even sure realized exactly what had happened. But he understood that it was important, and gave Jack the push he needed and as much time as he could.
He bends down for one final kiss, pressing his lips against Bittle’s and trying to memorize the feeling of it. He’s going to have to content himself with the memory for what he can already tell is going to feel like a long time. “I’ll text you,” he repeats. It doesn’t feel like enough to leave him with, but he doesn’t know what else he can say.
“Okay,” agrees Bittle. He looks at least as dazed and overwhelmed as Jack feels. Turning around and walking away might be one of the hardest things Jack has ever done.
He wonders how soon is too soon to text. He makes it to the car before giving in to the urge.
I’m glad it’s you, he texts. I’m glad some people are happy with platonic soulmates, but that’s not what I want. This is exactly what I want.