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You were in high school when you knew something was wrong.
It wasn’t a realization. It didn’t hit you. It didn’t come out of the blue. It didn’t surprise you. You just knew.
Something was wrong. And you didn’t know what.
You felt… not tired, but your body had this dull ache that was just too deep to wave off. You told your parents, and they were concerned, but not overly so. It was only when the feeling lingered that they took you to your doctor to get it checked out.
You knew your doctor. He was the same one you’ve been seeing your whole life. You’d never seen him like this, though. Concerned. Usually, there was nothing to report. The doctor would listen to your heart and ask questions about your diet and physical activity, and that was it. You’d never been referred elsewhere, and you’d certainly never been subjected to tests.
Your diagnosis was a chronic soul-link condition, and your prescription was to go to the library.
In hindsight, when you started feeling something strange in your body when you hadn’t done anything differently to make it do that, your mind should have jumped to your soulmate. Not everyone had one, but most people did, and pain bonds were common. Not as common as soulmarks, compasses, timers, or red strings, but still common enough that the given person usually knew a few people who could feel their soulmate’s pain.
Pain mirroring, it was called. When one soulmate was hurt, the other felt it too.
It was generally regarded as one of the more unfortunate types of soullinks to have. Not the worst, but it was pretty bad.
At least it was well documented. All of the more common types were. There were all kinds of books analyzing the meanings of different types of soulmarks, and there were all kinds of websites to help people with compasses locate their soulmates, and professional businesses that could follow the red strings of fate right to someone’s soulmate.
Pain mirroring didn’t have any of that, but there were a lot of books about it.
Anthologies. People describing different sensations, different types of pain, to help people who hadn’t found their soulmates identify and understand what they were feeling through their soulbonds.
There was a whole shelf of those books at the library. You picked the three thickest ones you could find to bring home. You thought it would be hard to find a story that sounded anything like what you were experiencing, but maybe that had been optimistic.
You found it maybe a quarter of the way through the first book. There was a whole chapter on it, actually.
Cancer.
The descriptions weren’t perfect. There were a lot of different types, and the feelings could be mistaken for plenty of other things, but you still knew it when you felt it.
The book was very descriptive. When certain sensations happened, what different things felt like. You were able to identify when your soulmate had chemotherapy appointments. The chemo itself wasn’t anything crazy, but your body would feel awful in the days that followed. It was like clockwork. There was no mistaking what it was.
You took some time off school, and your friends and teachers were understanding. Your siblings complained that you got to stay home and sleep all day, and you told them off for it. You had the energy for it. As bad as you felt, you weren’t the one with cancer. Your mind was still sharp, and you weren’t tired. Your body just hurt, and you didn’t want to move, but your mind did, and it was terrible, but still, you knew it was nothing compared to what your soulmate was experiencing.
It got bad. Really bad.
And then a blaring, searing pain unlike anything you’d experienced shot through you, and it was over.
The pain was gone. And it was a relief, but then the realization hit you. Cancer didn’t just magically disappear. Especially not cancer as bad as your soulmate had it. Your soulmate must have died.
Your relief that the pain was gone was stronger than the grief. You felt guilty about it for years, but the feeling didn’t change.
It was a full six years later before you felt something through your soul-link again.
At least, something you knew was pain in your soul-link. Six years was a long time. You graduated high school, went to college, got a job, all the normal things for a person your age. You had big changes, so what if you had phantom feelings you couldn’t explain every once in a while? You were always running around. Maybe you’d bumped your knee and got a bruise you hadn’t noticed.
But this new feeling was something you couldn’t deny was your soulbond. You’d read through those books even after you identified what kind of pain your soul-link was mirroring. You had the words to describe a thousand sensations, and this was nothing like any of them.
You were in your cubicle, at least. You could clench your jaw shut, press your lips together, and clap your hands over your mouth to keep any noise from escaping. The sensation only lasted a few seconds. It was an intense, full-body burning, and it reached deeper than something like an injury from a fire or a hot pan did.
Radiation? It was your best guess. But you’d felt months and months of chemotherapy through your bond, and it never really hurt. It was nothing like this.
You went back to the doctor just to be sure. A different one from before, since you were a grown-up now, and they did all the same tests and ended up giving you the same diagnosis and prescription.
Back to the library for you.
You were distracted before you could find the books. There was some kind of fundraiser? Hadhayosh relief, the banner said. Some kind of monster had appeared in Iran?
The monster irradiated the land. Something about that tickled something in your brain, but you couldn’t quite place it. You’d suspected something with radiation, sure, but they said anything that got close to the monster died instantly, and you felt things through your soulbond afterward, so that couldn’t be it.
The books weren’t helpful, but as the years stretched on, you ended up buying copies of the ones you kept coming back to. You were always feeling things through your soulbond now.
Well, not always. Cancer had been always. This was more… frequent. You felt things frequently, and they were strange sensations. That burning, but also cold feelings, or struggling with your breath, or straining in your muscles, or headaches, or dull pressure on different parts of your body. It was just all so weird, and none of the books mentioned anything like it, but you kept turning back to them because there had to be something.
Your life went on, and you kept reading. Your career went on, and your friends found their soulmates and got married, and your parents asked if you’d ever consider dating. There were other people who had lost their soulmates, after all, but you never had the courage to tell them you thought your soulmate was still alive. You didn’t know why. It was a good thing, but you didn’t know how to explain it, and then just too much time had passed.
You were in your forties when the worst sensation of all hit.
Worse, you were in a meeting, but you couldn’t even find it in you to be embarrassed because you couldn’t breathe, and it was horrible. The scariest thing you’d felt yet. A terrible sensation seized your throat and lungs, and it felt like there was something inside them, and you just couldn’t catch your breath. There was nothing there, and you knew it, and you tried to communicate it to the people around you, but it just felt so real.
You came pretty close to passing out, your brain refusing to let your body take a proper breath, but the sensation faded abruptly, and this time, you knew your soulmate was dead.
This time, you cried.
They’d been with you for your whole life, after all.
Someone called for the paramedics to check you out, and you let yourself be taken away. You got the same diagnosis you always did, but you didn’t get the same prescription, not exactly.
Instead of books on what pain-mirroring soulbonds felt like, you got a list of local support groups and books about people who’d lost their soulmates.
Your coworker gave you a ride home, and you ordered the books online. That was something you could do now. How the world had changed. The thought felt bland, though. Your soulmate was dead.
You’d never even met them. You hadn’t grieved them the first time, but it had been a long time since then. It hurt now. Maybe not worse than the sensations you’d felt through the soulbond, but it was enough to keep you at home for the day. And the next. And the next.
It was a little surprising when some of your coworkers came to see you at home. You wouldn’t say you were friends, but it was kind of them. They seemed excited. They said they had news.
Or, they wanted you to watch the news. Or look at the news. Whatever.
Alexandria was dead. Skitter—Weaver, whatever, some parahuman girl in Brockton Bay—had killed her by filling her lungs with insects.
There was no description of how that felt, not like the books you’d spent your life reading, but you knew that was it.
Your soulmate was Alexandria.
That made a lot of sense, actually.
No, it didn’t. Alexandria had cancer?
But everything else lined up. Behemoth—Hadhayosh, he’d been called, when you first heard of him—poured out radiation. Leviathan drowned people with his tidal waves. The Simurgh fucked with people’s heads. Once you thought about it, the timelines added up with what you’d experienced. You thought you probably could have figured it out on your own if the idea wasn’t so preposterous.
Little old you, just a regular everyday person, was soulbonded to Alexandria.
But it didn’t even matter because she was dead.
Somehow, that pulled you out of your pain. Not completely, but it helped. You hadn’t lost someone, not really, and you were able to get your life back on track.
And then a few months later, Behemoth attacked again, and a video leaked showing Alexandria fighting him, but you didn’t feel anything.
Your coworkers were excited. They told you to contact the PRT even though Alexandria wasn’t part of the Protectorate anymore, but you just shook your head and didn’t say anything. That wasn’t Alexandria. Whoever that was in the video, you knew it wasn’t her.
And then she was on your balcony.
She wasn’t wearing a mask.
She looked at you with one brown eye and one scarred purple one.
Your resolution grew. This wasn’t Alexandria. Her body, but not her soul. Not your soulmate.
She spoke, and her voice sounded like it did on TV, but somehow you knew it was someone else. “You’re Alexandria’s soulmate.”
A man, you were pretty sure. It wasn’t important. You nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he told you, and you wanted to cry again, but you didn’t. Grief never ended, really, but you’d done your grieving months ago, and nothing had changed, not today.
You probed a little. The man in your soulmate’s body didn’t actually know much. Her mind and soul had died, but not her body, and it was his now, and he hated it, but it was necessary. You could understand that. You didn’t like it, but neither did he, and that didn’t make it okay, but it was close enough.
“I can feel something still. She’s really smart,” the man told you. “I think she could have found you on her own, but she didn’t. I don’t know why, but I get it. I’m doing this to protect my soulmate. It means I can’t be with him, but it’s worth it to keep him safe. I’m sure she felt the same way about you.”
You didn’t know how you felt about that. She could have found you? But she chose not to? To keep you safe, even though she was constantly inflicting this terrible pain upon you? But the emotions on the man’s face—on your soulmate’s face—were genuine, and your anger softened. You could process that later. For now…
You reached out. You took his hand, her hand, and you felt your soulmate’s touch for the first time.
You pulled her in. You kissed her softly, and she kissed back with only a moment’s hesitation, and it still wasn’t her, but it was close enough, and maybe it was close enough for him too. You didn’t know, and you didn’t really care. This was something for both of you, a last grasp at a lifeline, maybe. You just needed something.
But it wasn’t fair. Not to you, not to him. He still had a soulmate. You didn’t. And you needed to accept that.
You pulled away, and his eyes were surprisingly kind. There was a question in them, but you didn’t answer it. You thanked him, and he nodded, and you never saw him again, and you were perfectly happy with that.
A whole life of pain. In a way, Alexandria had brought it on herself. She’d found a way to escape, and then she just kept going back for more.
Maybe you would have been happy together. Maybe you would have resented the way she kept throwing herself into fight after fight, endangering herself instead of just being happy. But you wouldn’t know because Alexandria hadn’t let you, and maybe it was better that way.