A.E.S.
We have all known pain in our lives, be it our own or that of others. It’s bearable, of course, humanity having evolved to adapt, to endure, to survive. It passes, as all things do, like clouds over the sun.
And yet.
And yet we hurt, and hunger, and grieve. For what is humanity, but pain? Fate is not known to be kind.
So, naturally, she had to go and make you feel the pain of your Soulmate as well.
Stephen is only four when the first strike falls.
How odd, he thinks, to have his pudgy fingertips fizzle and pop and sting, how utterly strange that he should burn, rather than be held close in loving arms and sung to sleep.
Stephen is only four when the first strike falls, and it’s...worse. So much worse. Worse than the phantom pinch of sparks, worse than the poke of an unaccounted for screwdriver in the dark. He is only four, when his head snaps to the side with a crack, and he begins to wail, breakfast forgotten.
Thinking back on it, when he still thought about it, when he still cared; he wondered in horror how anyone could ever do such a thing to one so young. Stephen had only been four when the first strike fell, his soulmate just as young, if not younger. He brings his hand to his cheek, lips parting in a pantomime of a scream.
He'd stared hard at the initials inked in neat black capitals on his wrist from the moment he understood what they meant. Tall and proud, if not a bit rushed, they stared right back, stark against his pale skin.
A.E.S.
--
It is an awful thing, to cry out with no one there and nothing to hurt him. (It is an awful thing, to hurt all the same.)
There are bruises on his elbows and an aching in his jaw. At night his ears pop, and by day his fingers sting. The lingering taste of grease hangs around him-- a smoke to his throat he can’t cough out.
None of it his. (But it is, they do; belong to him, haunt him, pain him. Made for him.)
Why, then, must he cry?
Maybe it was the Universe, maybe it was Fate, twirling red strings into knots as she laughed, and laughed, and laughed. It was a phenomenon. It was a curse. (It was why he’d flinch when his mother went to caress his cheek, it was why his father’s shadow would terrify him, even as he lay enveloped in his arms.)
It was the initials on his wrist, scrawled in boyhood cut short, inked black capitals stark against the dawn. Soulmates, then. They stared up at him, as if in laughter.
A.E.S.