Chapter Text
"All right, all right, settle down. Hope everybody enjoyed their lunch, cause it’s time for everybody’s favourite subject - Family Life!”
About three quarters of the students screamed as loud as they could, and Dr. Grace threw his head back in a laugh. “Okay, okay, calm down. We’re not talking about sex yet. Mrs. Smith will cover that with you next year.”
The screaming calmed down and he waited for the right moment to drop his next sentence.
One beat.
Two beat.
“Today we’re just going to talk about some of the ways your bodies are changing.”
Twenty students’ voices picked up the scream again, and Dr. Grace absolutely cackled. Oh kids were so easy to wind up…
“All right, all right,” he said after a few seconds. “Relax. No puberty today either. We’re just going to talk a bit about soul marks.”
In his earliest memory, there is pain. He’s seated in his mother’s lap staring at a brightly coloured mural of Noah’s Ark that he knows in hindsight must have been the wall of a children’s hospital waiting room, and his arm is on fire.
He doesn’t know how old he is in the memory. His parents tell him they were in and out of the hospital every couple of months trying to find a doctor who could finally explain what was happening to him, so the mural could have been at any number of clinics at any time in the first five or so years of his life.
He doesn’t remember the doctors, but his mother tells him they all said about the same thing: they had no explanation for why there was a chunk of rough stone imbedded in his arm where a soul mark should be. Or, not stone exactly, they insisted. It was just some sort of iron oxide-based deposit in his skin. Stone would be impossible. Children can’t just grow stones into their flesh! The growth was only stonelike!
Not that it made any difference to him. Stone or not, it was there. Stone or not, it hurt. Not all the time, mind you. Sometimes it just sat there feeling almost nothing at all for days on end. But when it did hurt, jeepers creepers did it hurt! It was sharp and hot, like knives were carving into him, or fire searing his skin. None of the doctors seemed to know why that was either: where the pain came from or why it wasn’t always around. There were theories of course – dozens of koinonologists had written their entire masters theses on his case – but nobody ever seemed certain.
What they could be certain of, though, was that it couldn’t be removed. They’d tried. Surgeries and lasers and any number of medicated creams and ointments. None of it worked. The stone was part of the arm. To keep the arm was to keep the stone.
“Just wait,” they told his parents. “When he’s older we can try again to fix it. For now here’s something for the pain and we’ll see you again next month.”
The pain was his constant companion for years. He was the only kid in his kindergarten class who came with an instruction booklet on administering local anesthetic. Eventually it became mundane. Just a part of his life.
Until suddenly it wasn’t. He couldn’t say when exactly the pain had gone away any more than he could point to when it started, but one day the school nurse had called home to check he was okay since she hadn’t seen him for a while and he realized it had stopped. The stone was still there but the pain had gone, reduced from the intensity of a branding iron to nothing more than the occasional light bruise. He was free.
The mention of soul marks got their attention. It always did. Twenty pairs of eyes fixed on him with rapt attention, an understanding passing between them that if anybody interrupted a chance they might have to see Dr. Grace’s soul mark with something as trivial as a scream their social life would be over. This was the moment the class had been waiting for all year, longer for those who had siblings in older grades. He smiled. What most teachers would do to have a class this invested and well-behaved in Family Life of all subjects…
“All right, now that we’ve settled, who can tell me what a soul mark is? Yes, Annie?”
"It's a mark that tells you who your soulmate will be," Annie said brightly, holding out her forearm to show off the patch of bright freckled skin that stood out so starkly against her own dark complexion. "This bit of my arm's the same colour as my soulmate's skin, so when I'm old enough to date I can know who's worth even trying with."
"Very good, Annie, have a hacky sack. Yes, your soul mark will be the same colour as your soul mate's skin tone. Does anyone else know any other ways people use their soul marks to find their soulmates? Jose?"
"Um... when you get it?"
"Yes, that can be important. How can you use when you get your mark to figure out who your soulmate is?"
"Well... uh... sometimes if you don't got a mark, and then one day you do..."
Dr. Grace nodded and gave an encouraging smile.
"Then my mom says that means your soulmate wasn't born yet so when it comes that means they're born now so their birthday's gotta be then, right?"
"Yes, exactly! Full points to Jose!” He tossed him a hacky sack from the bin on his desk before turning back to the rest of the class. “Soul marks can't appear unless both people have been born already. It's not just that your skin looks like theirs, it is actually a piece of them. So until you both have skin there's nothing there to swap. If you're born without a soul mark usually it means your soulmate is going to be younger than you and it'll appear on their birthday. Yes, Pete? Do you have a question?"
"No, I know another way to tell who your soulmate is."
"Oh? And how's that?"
"Like this!" He gave a spit-eating grin and pinched the arm of his friend Markus as hard as he could. Across the room, Rachel gave a shout of pain and the whole class burst into laughter as both Markus and Rachel glared at Pete, faces bright red.
"All right, all right," Dr. Grace projected over the laughter. "Everybody settle down. Pete, remember we keep our hands to ourselves in the classroom, all right? Rachel, are you okay?" She groaned in embarrassment but didn't seem to be otherwise hurt so he pressed on. "Methods aside, Pete is right about touch transfer. Since a soul mark is your skin on somebody else's body, you can feel it if anything happens to that skin."
“But how?”
“And here comes Madi with the thousand dollar question! If you can answer that one you could win the Nobel Prize in Koinonology!”
He’d taken koinonology courses in college. Of course he had. How could he not want to understand everything he could about soulmates when he himself was such an outlier in the field? In his first few years he’d even considered majoring in the subject, but soon found that the science aspects of the study of soulmates were too tied up in sociology and philosophy and religion and plain old superstition for his tastes.
It was too bad, because what few objective scientific studies he had found were fascinating! Philosophers droned on about why people were paired how they were, or if animals had soulmates too, or whether or not it was ethical to date somebody who wasn’t your soulmate, but the studies he latched onto were the ones that asked the more objective questions. Were the sensations transmitted through soul marks restricted by the speed of light, for example? Preliminary experiments with astronauts in lunar orbit seemed to indicate they weren’t which had all sorts of implications for everything from theoretical physics to communications, but were people studying that? Of course not! Everybody was too busy navel gazing about whether or not it was possible to truly love somebody who wasn’t your soulmate and frankly he couldn’t care less.
What he did find interesting was his class on Abnormal Koinonology. People with so-called “animatal disorders” who never got a soul mark, or had more than one, or whose marks disappeared. There were stories about people whose marks connected them to their pets, people who bleached or tattooed over their soulmarks to pretend they were connected to people they werent, and nuns who insisted their soul marks connected them directly to Jesus Christ (though Ryland had his doubts about those - if Jesus really had that many soulmates he wouldnt have any skin left that was really his!).
While the rest of the class gawked at the freaks and wondered if there might be a way to cure sick souls, Ryland looked for something that might explain the confusion that was his life. But in all his reading, he never found reference to someone like him. Plenty of people had no soul mark - discovering the aromantic community had been a big deal for him - but nobody else had a craggy bit of unpolished hematite where their perfect match should be.
Ryland started wearing long sleeved shirts and switched his major to microbiology. Bacteria didn’t call you broken or act like it was a tragedy that you weren’t like them.
“You mean nobody even knows how it works?”
“Not entirely, no. There are theories, but-“
“What kind of theories?”
Another kid pipes up before Ryland can answer. “My grandpa says God decides who goes together and lets them touch from far away cause he loves us so much.”
“That’s dumb, Jakob, god doesn’t do stuff like that!”
“He might! How do you know? Did you ask him?”
“Okay first of all-“
“My hand is up!” Dr. Grace called above the rising din. The students quieted and looked back at him. “Right. Now to get back to Kira’s question, there’s lots of ideas of how soul marks might work. Like Jakob said, some people think it’s God or fate or some sort of ghost, and it might be! But I think it’s more likely something else. Something we don’t really understand yet. It’s one of those exciting questions that the next generation of scientists gets to ask. Who knows! Maybe one of you will figure it out someday!”
A kid in the front row raises her hand - one he’s been subtly keeping an eye out for since the topic of soul marks was breached. He wasn’t certain. Maybe her soulmate just had the same skintone she did. But the timidness with which she speaks when he calls on her makes him almost certain he’s right.
“Um, Dr. Grace? Do you think… does everybody have a soulmate? Or are some people just…”
She trails off, but he knows the end of that sentence. He’s heard it a hundred times before, often in his own head. Am I just broken? Heartless? Unloveable?
He leans on the edge of his desk, trying to sound as nonchalant and matter-of-fact as he can. No need to stigmatize it further. “Not everybody, no. What you have to remember is there’s lots of different kinds of love. The soulmate kind is only one of them. You can love your friends or your job or your family or your pets. A soulmate isn’t everything.” He gave that a second to sink in, watching the tension ease from her shoulders before casually as he could adding “I mean look at me. I’m plenty happy and I don’t have a soulmate.”
The class was so quiet he could hear the buzz of the ceiling lights. This was the moment they had been waiting for. The moment they would finally confirm one way or the other if the rumours their older siblings had told them were true. He smiled innocently, waiting for the question he knew was coming.
“Dr. Grace do you really got a rock instead of a soulmark?”
He grinned and pushed off from the desk. “Yup. Anyway, that’s enough Family Life for today who wants to do some algebra?” He turned toward the board, in part to conceal the laughter he couldn’t help at the panicked protests that erupted behind him. This was his favourite part of the year.
He turned back around with a look of mock surprise. “What’s that? I thought you hated Family Life! No? You want to keep going? Okay let’s talk about the reproductive system. What? What do you mean we’re not done with soul marks? You want to see it? See what? My soul mark? Oh, nah, you don’t wanna see that. It’s pretty boring. You want it? You’re sure? Well okay then…”
He made a big show of moving back in front of the class and rolling up his sleeve to reveal the brown stone beneath. Every kid in the class leaned as close as they could to see. Various gasps of “Woah” and “That’s so cool” echoed around the room and he smiled. This is why he loved being a teacher. To kids, his weird soul mark wasn’t a disorder or a sign that he couldn’t be trusted. He was the cool guy with a neat rock on his arm, not the guy who didn’t even have a soulmate.
“-no immediate family. You don’t even have a soulmate.”
His spine straightened instantly at her words, one hand instinctively coming up to touch the place where his rocky soul mark was hidden under his sleeve. She knew. Of course she knew. If word could travel between the kids he taught of course it had travelled to Stratt. And of course she was using it against him now. Nothing was off limits to her.
He doubted his little speech about multiple kinds of love would do much to sway her.
“Can I think about it?”
Grace curled up as close as he could to the curved window, staring back in the direction he knew home lay. He could barely remember it, but he knew it meant something to him. Enough that he’d given his life up to save it. Enough that he bore its mark on his arm.
Because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? That’s what it had always been. His soulmate wasn’t a person, it was a planet. That’s why he had the rock. He was bonded to all of Earth, and they to him.
He ran an absentminded thumb over that rock. It was much smoother than it had been when he was younger; between rubbing it to self-soothe and his habit of using it to pound nails or push pins into particularly stubborn bulletin boards when he didn’t have a hammer to hand, it had worn to an almost mirror shine in places. But it was still there. Still tying him to a home he would never return to.
An alarm sounded somewhere deep in the ship. Blip A detected.
What? What’s a Blip A?